When it comes to purchasing Xbox Live Arcade games, I am always quite frugal. Personally, I won’t pick up an XBLA game that is anything short of stellar. (I like to save my money for the big retail games … and booze, too, I guess.) Unsurprisingly, Rocketmen: Axis of Evil is one of those games that I would not buy … never in a hundred years.

Why is Rocketmen so utterly horrendous? Hit the jump for the rest of my review!

When I first booted up Rocketmen, I have to admit that I did not have very high expectations. A cartoony top-down shooter? I’ve seen it done before. But Capcom and A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.’s entry into the genre on the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network was just so poorly conceived and poorly executed. Somehow, the game seemed to be able to undermine even my low expectations.

One of the first things that I noticed about the game was the cartoon frame-style cutscenes that the game offered in between levels. At first, this style of storytelling looks and feels unique, but after about three scenes it gets very annoying, convincing me to bash the A button to get skip through each character’s dialogue. The voice acting is alright, and the bits of comedy strewn throughout may appeal to a younger audience than myself. All in all, the story (save the princess, kill the bad guy) is vague and unappealing.

Not only is the story bad, but the gameplay is even worse. The game starts you off with a pistol type gun which you can then put away for a few seconds of rapid-fire goodness when you find a power-up. Hundreds (and I mean hundreds) of martians will swarm in on you with nothing left for your character to do but gun them down. This type of action was fun for a while on the SNES, but what ever happened to a game having a little substance? Shouldn’t there be enemies that can’t be killed by a certain weapon, or something to juice up the gameplay a little? The formula here is to shoot the martians (or mercurians or saturnians or whatever) before they shoot you. Is it really too much to ask to have a little depth?

Other problems that I experienced while playing the game were a fixed and completely unwieldy camera, that made collecting items and power-ups literally impossible at some times, and a major problem with character integration into the various levels. What I mean by this is that many times I would pick up a power-up or be hit by a bullet that missed me by a fairly significant margin. This type of problem is unacceptable and should have been caught early on in play testing.

In sum, I cannot say that I had fun with Rocketmen persay, although I did manage to complete the game (if only for the illustrious Achievement Points) once through without too much frustration.