Boom Boom Rocket was released on Xbox Live Arcade today. I took some time to check it out this morning. Boom Boom Rocket is pretty much Dance Dance Revolution played with a controller. All of the button presses are timed to the beats of the music so if you have no rhythm this one might be pretty hard for you. I played percussion (drums) for years and I still had a lot of trouble on the Hard difficulty. On Easy I breezed through it. On Normal things got pretty tense, but on Hard I could not make it through the first 30 seconds. The game is simple to play but tough to master. It supports two players on the same screen but no support for playing over Xbox Live. It is probably better that way because any lag at all would kill your ability to effectively play.

Boom Boom Rocket comes with 10 songs. For a game where you play to the music that is not a lot of songs. Sure, each song can be played on three difficulty settings and in two different game modes, but after playing through these songs for the 6th or 8th time the increased difficulty will not change the fact that you are hearing the same songs over and over. When I first heard about this game I was thinking it would have closer to 20 songs. Having only 10 really cuts the value of this game down.

The Achievements for Boom Boom Rocket range from easy to very very hard. You can easily get the first achievement withing the first minute of playing, but the harder ones will take hours of practice to earn.

Personally, Boom Boom Rocket is not for me. With only 10 songs it gets to repetitive to fast. I played for 30 minutes and was already getting board. For an 800 point ($10) game I expect some level of lasting appeal, but Boom Boom Rocket just doesn’t have any appeal for me.