Jetpac Refuelled - Review

Added March 30th, 2007 by Joel Kownacki

Microsoft has had a very solid month when it comes to Xbox Live Arcade titles -- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and now Jetpac Refuelled, Rare’s latest venture. Not a whole lot of people know Jetpac as a Rare game because it was originally published under Ultimate Play The Game. The franchise was reborn under the name Jetpac Refuelled. This is the first title Rare has developed for Xbox Live Arcade. While the visuals have undergone a total revamp, the gameplay holds true to the original with very little variation. The download also includes the Retro version as well, but unlike wine, certain old school arcade games just don’t get better with age.

The basic premise of Jetpac Refuelled is this: you’re an astronaut in outer space and have crash landed on a planet. Your ship is disassembled and you have to put it back together. Once your space craft is reconstructed, your goal is to find enough gas to fill it up and leave the planet’s surface. Collecting each spaceship part and placing them to build ship is as easy as flying your astronaut into each part, then flying to the designated dropping point. The same mechanism is used to collecting gas canisters to fuel your ship. Along the way, various alien life forms appear in different patterns. These attacks vary from a horizontal direction, a wave direction, to aliens trying to fly in your direction only to be stopped by hitting a platform or killing you. You have two weapons at your disposal -- a basic laser gun with three different powerups and an EMP that kills everything in sight. You are given a set amount of EMP’s from the beginning and can obtain more by steering your astronaut into little EMP icons. The same goes for weapon powerups. I really wish Rare would have put a few more powerups in the game. Three is pretty limited and they don’t really differ from one another all that much. Another folly is when you collect a fourth powerup, it cycles back down to the basic laser beam, a poor design choice.

Jetpac Refuelled sports some of the best 2D graphics on XBLA. There’s something about Rare’s art style that really stands out. The colors, backdrops, and character design all blend perfectly together. The action on screen looks like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved with particle effects shooting and bouncing off everything causing huge explosions of pixilated goodness. Rare does game visuals like no one else. The music is simple but catchy with two different tunes, one plays during the game’s 128 levels and the other during the high scores menu.

Summary:

After playing Jetpac Refuelled for an extended period of time, I want nothing more out of XBLA than to see Rare create fresh new games for it. Battletoads remake possibly? Killer Instinct? I can’t imagine them not coming to the marketplace. Jetpac Refuelled is by no means perfect, but there is a lot of fun to be had with this XBLA title.