I beat the Nintendo DS game Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime over the short vacation I took surrounding Thanksgiving this year. It’s a charming, slightly flawed but very fun little action adventure game. Think ‘simple portable zelda,’ and you have some notion of what the gameplay is all about. It has a couple of novel elements – your character is the equivalent of a rubber band in terms of mechanics, so you spend a good bit of the game bounding about the levels spranging into and off of things, which is more fun than it sounds. It also features ridiculously silly giant tank battle sequences which pit you and your crew against an enemy crew. You can spend your time loading the tanks guns, defending against enemy assaults on your tank, or you can try and infiltrate the enemy tank and take the battle to them, sprangy rubber band style.

The game’s intended for kids but is still great fun. It has a few flaws – it’s way to easy, it’s on the short side, it’s easy to exploit the enemy ai during the tank battles, and the general ease of play means you don’t have to interact with some of the gameplay systems, like collecting items and formulas that allow you to develop better ammunition for your tank. Despite all this, it’s still a great little game and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the zelda action adventure school of gaming and can tolerate the kiddie aesthetic.