Title	Rocking Pilot
Developer	Gungrounds
Publisher	Mad Head Games
Release Date	May 15, 2017
Genre	Shoot ’em up
Platform	Mobile, PC
Age Rating	E10
Official Website

Rocking Pilot is a fun little game to break out on those rainy days.  It doesn’t do a whole lot to really distinguish itself from the mold, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do and as a result, you got a twin stick shooter that can serve as a fun little distraction if you have a couple hours to kill.

Rocking Pilot takes place in a future where people have nothing else better to do than watch stuff explode on television. You play as “The Pilot”, a popular reality TV star who is cast in a popular television show: Global Conflict! What this means is, you are to take on various missions destroying lots and lots of machines and vehicles. Before each main story mission, you are greeted with a brief dialogue scene with The Pilot and either his commander or whoever he will be fighting. The character portraits in these scenes are really nice and I particularly like the design of The Pilot. It’s clear he has a certain fondness for 80s fashion and that’s alright with me.

You control a small helicopter that can shoot in any direction, but also has the ability to use its propellers to either damage enemies or use ‘Overdrive mode’ to reflect bullets. Whenever you activate Overdrive mode, your overdrive meter will quickly deplete so be sure to use it carefully. Most stages have about 3 main objectives for you to complete and each will yield a different reward. Some of these rewards are new enhancements for your ship or keys to unlock additional levels. The objectives themselves are fairly simple however there is a decent amount of them that get switched around fairly frequently to keep the gameplay fresh. Usually, they involve destroying a certain amount of enemies, defeating a boss, saving friendly allies or surviving a wave without using a particular ability or shooting.

Complete challenges to unlock special power-ups

The overall difficulty of the game is not that high in comparison to many other games of its genre, however, some of the later optional objectives can definitely be challenging. This would be considered a bullet hell shooter as the screen is often filled with enemies, bullets, and explosions but it never gets too overwhelming. True to its name Rocking Pilot has some very exciting tunes to get you pumped to destroy stuff. The graphics are very clean and the HUD looks like it was designed for a touch screen with really large buttons and colors that can really grab your attention. With that said, the game controls very well with a PlayStation 4 controller so I recommend using one of those.

At 5.99 Rocking Pilot is a good purchase. To those of you looking for another nice shooter to add to your digital libraries, Rocking Pilot is worth checking out. It won’t take you very long to get to the end of the main story, however, the score attack modes will keep you coming back for more.

Review Score
Overall

Review Copy Provided by publisher