Those poor sight seeing aliens. They're out and about in the universe enjoying themselves when they're hit upon by a meteor storm. It's time for damage control. Help guide the aliens to their rescue ships with the use of paddles that deflect, bounce, drip, and contain all manner of other strange properties as you navigate around the meteor fields.

One of the most amusing things about Puzzle Rocket is also one of the most horrifying if you stop to think about it. The goal of each stage is to get the aliens from their derelict spacecraft to the rescue rockets. Now common sense says you should set up your paddles before opening the release valve and jettisoning the aliens into the murky vacuum of space, but how are you meant to adjust the paddles to the right trajectory if you have no way to test them out? The first order of business each level then is to flip that lever, allow the limitless supply of extra terrestrials to expire until you work out how to fill the limited capacity of each rocket, possibly collect the stars scattered around each level, and then move on to the next stranded ship.

You need to be making a lot of little adjustments as finding solutions to each level is a game of finesse. The amount of paddles you have to work with are in the bottom left corner, with colors indicating the property of each paddle, and a series of circles indicating how many you have at your disposal. Paddles when dragged have a radius around them that can be used to move and rotate them, but for rotating, your best bet is using the clockwise and counter-clockwise rotate buttons, as this grants greater control as you watch how the angle affects the passage of all those little aliens.

It's this exactness of paddle placement that makes the game kind of troublesome however. There's just too much fine-tuning, and once the help signs stop suggesting areas for paddle placement and you're left to your own ingenuity, there's just more frustration than fun. Now there will be the type of puzzle gamer who will jump at all the experimentation possible in saving these creatures, and it's not to say that the presentation, level design, and sheer number of different paddles aren't extremely well done, it's just we don't see this game having a broad appeal as it is, and that's unfortunate as it seems that's what it's aiming for.