ShapeRockets Review

Rock, Paper, Scissors. Roshambo. Wuzazu. Mushi-ken. The game has many names throughout human culture, and now it has a new one: ShapeRockets. With what is quite possibly the best videogame interpretation of the traditional game, developers Echohead Games look set to join the multiplayer shooter genre with a truly unique selling point.

A minimalistic arena shooter, you play as a shape-changer that can fire a facsimile of your current shape in order to destroy the enemies of the opposing colour. Red spheres are rocks, blue cubes are paper and green pyramids are scissors, and their interactions work exactly as the original rules state with the only difference being that hitting a similar coloured player will heal them.

The main crux of the game is of course online, and unfortunately there are not many people playing at the moment. We were supplied with multiple codes, but there was nobody else playing with us while we did, and looking at SteamSpy - which we of course take with a pinch of salt - seems to show that very few people have been playing much outside of the launch week.

Outside of that singular issue, the multiplayer is pretty great. The netcode is rather solid and we had no issues hosting and playing the game. There’s a big selection of maps which offer some unique places to play and ShapeRockets does something brilliant with light. All the arenas are very dark, but the player models all emit a lot of light of their colour which adds a lot of tactics to what is otherwise a simple game.

There is a tutorial which has the only semblance of story in the game, though it really is only an introduction to the multiplayer. Alongside this is an endurance mode, which tasks you with staying alive and racking up points. You have ten lives, but I couldn’t manage to stay alive for very long because the game spawns the opposite type of enemy to you, so no matter what shape you choose to become you will have to be constantly dodging lethal attacks from behind. The arena is also very small with nowhere to hide, so unlike the multiplayer levels it feels very restrictive.

ShapeRockets has no standard options menu either: the one listed lets you change your icon and username, but nothing more. The game even has the cheek to title that menu “The Only Option”, and call me an entitled gamer but I’d like to have the option to turn down the audio without having to change it in the Windows Volume Mixer, let alone modifying the graphics settings.

Overall, ShapeRockets is a good concept for a multiplayer shooter, but suffers the curse of almost all indie multiplayer shooters: it struggles to find an audience. The endurance mode feels pretty unfair, and there’s no progression to it to give me any reason to want to play it. I also think that the game is restricted by its concept, since the only game mode is deathmatch.