The sky zoo concept is neat and adds a great wraparound frame to the core arcade-y gameplay, but everything works because the actual game itself is enjoyable. There are unlockable hats and other things with which to adorn your rider, significantly reducing the risk that you’ll bounce off the game and go elsewhere. Both gameplay systems complement one another beautifully, creating that rarest and holiest of beasts in Rodeo Stampede: a symbiotic game that evokes the desire to play each half to see what happens in the other half. Upgrading enclosures grants gameplay bonuses during arcade sections you might be able to extend the amount of time before an animal gets angry and throws you off, or you might be able to add more exotic or faster animals to the stampede. In order to get them to visit, you’ll need to attract them with increasingly rare and interesting animals, and to do so you need to capture them in the arcade sections.Įach animal you capture can be housed in an enclosure which can then be upgraded with Coins, the in-game currency of Rodeo Stampede: Savannah. You’re the owner of a zoo in the sky, and you want people to come see it. As you might expect from a genre-melding game, the gameplay isn’t exactly Cities: Skylines levels deep, but it’s certainly more than adequate considering it’s wrapped around such a tight core gameplay loop. The other side of gameplay in Rodeo Stampede is the management sim gameplay. The music and sound design are also top-notch, perfectly evoking the atmosphere the game is going for. Elsewhere, you’re physically fired into each arcade stage from a cannon, which makes a satisfying “boom” sound each time it happens. One neat example is when you’re moving around between your sky zoo (more on which in a moment) and other areas, the zeppelin that ferries you between locations will actually move on the map. Rodeo Stampede: Savannah is full of little touches that make the experience feel at once homely and professionally-done. It helps that the presentation is so wonderful. You’ll need to press the space bar twice – once to leap and once to re-attach yourself to another animal – so timing is crucial. Watching your protagonist fling themselves bodily from animal to animal simply never stops being funny, but it helps that doing so also feels great and demands a certain amount of skill. There’s a wonderful fluidity to the movement systems in Rodeo Stampede that makes each arcade section a joy to play. Your input is restricted to the left and right arrow keys and the space bar, so Rodeo Stampede is all about watching for obstacles and reacting to them appropriately when they do come up. Forward momentum is handled entirely by the game, so you won’t need to worry about keeping up with the screen like in Crossy Road. The game shares similarities with auto-runner games like Subway Surfers, too. The aim of each arcade section is to capture new animals which can then be used in the management part of the game to bring in extra money. Space bar will cause your protagonist to leap merrily through the air, and pressing it again will anchor them to an animal that’s stampeding. You’ll do this simply through the use of the arrow keys and the space bar. Your first is to wrangle animals in the game’s arcade mode. In Rodeo Stampede, you have two very different but complementary objectives. Still, that philosophy of excellent game design realized in beautifully-rendered natural landscapes is intact. The evolution from Skiing Yeti Mountain is easy to see – the visuals are better in Rodeo Stampede, and the gameplay has been refined. Both games have a central theme of animals and nature, but more crucially both games are essentially arcade experiences with a tight core mechanic and an emphasis on movement. The similarities between Featherweight’s two games are fairly subtle, but they’re there. Similarly, this Rodeo Stampede game is centered around a stampeding horde of animals who must be thoroughly rodeo’d in order to tame them. Believe it or not, Skiing Yeti Mountain focused on a yeti on a mountain who was – yes indeed – skiing. You might know Featherweight from their previous title, the rather idiosyncratically-titled Skiing Yeti Mountain. The same can’t be said for the protagonist of Rodeo Stampede: Savannah, a curious mixture of management sim and Crossy Road-style arcade wrassle-’em-up from Australian studio Featherweight Games. Eventually, as roping and steer wrestling became irrelevant to the everyday working lives of most people in the USA, rodeo became a sport rather than a vocation, and that’s where we’re at right now. Did you know that rodeo events arose out of cattle herding in Middle and South America? It’s true – the skills needed to be a successful cowboy were actually pretty transferable when it came to having fun and relaxing of an evening.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |