I spend a lot of time thinking about video games. My main activity at home is playing them, the main things that I watch are about video games, a huge amount of my conversation with friends is about video games. In my head I’ve designed video games, I’ve improved existing video games, I’ve deconstructed video games and now I’m planning to write a dissertation about video games.
I also spend a lot of time wondering why I do this. (more…)
As much as I’d like to keep reviewing brand-new titles, at £30-40 a pop I’d struggle. I want to get at least one review done a week though. Thank the heavens for Steam and their “Games under £4″ option, where I was able to pick up a couple of games for under a fiver. This one was on sale for just £1.75 and it’s definitely worth at least a tenner.
The story is simple and streamlined: you start in Hades – the Greek underworld – with Sisyphus, who is forever damned to push a great boulder to the top of a hill, just to watch it roll back down again. Sisyphus quickly gets bored with his lot in death and smashes his way out of hell using said boulder. You are that boulder. Accompanying Sisyphus as he rampages through time, from the classical era to the 17th century, you’ll be squishing elephants, airships, the Archangel Micheal, Cardinal Richelieu and a host of other mythical and historical figures.
It’s a silly plot for a gleefully silly game, heavily influenced by the legacy of Monty Python, with Gilliam-esque animation and a sense of humour that revolves around girly screams and fart noises. You will most likely be chuckling throughout the three or so hours you’ll be spending with the campaign – notable moments include an existential monologue from Leonardo da Vinci and a boss fight with a famous groin. The game also looks incredibly pretty, the same visual flair used for the cut-scenes has been very effectively rendered in the Unreal engine. The backdrops to the tracks are interesting but not distracting and the levels themselves all have very distinct looks. If you’ve always wanted to know what Goya’s Saturn would look like if rendered into a gigantic 3D model then this is the game for you – hint: it’s fantastically creepy.
The gameplay boils down to this: race your rock along a track towards the enemy base, dodging defences and environmental obstacles in order to smash down their gates before they do the same to you. Rocks take time to build so once you’ve crunched into your opponent’s gate you’ll have about forty-five seconds to build up your own defences to foil their boulder-based plan. Gold – used for building defences and special rocks to give you the edge on the track – is earned by destroying objects and defences along the track to the game becomes a well-balanced mix of speed versus money-making.
An actual match – either against the AI or an online opponent – is a tense, well-paced affair: most of the time it comes down to a nail-biting last race to the gate between victory and defeat. Unfortunately though, the placement of defences can sometimes feel a bit meaningless. You aren’t really given enough time between boulders to think too hard about which defences should go where and I usually resorted to spamming bombs down my track just to slow my opponent down. I also never really found enemy defences too much of a challenge and it’s incredibly difficult to actually get a hit on an enemy boulder if you can’t slow them down. A task that, on many of the tracks is pretty much impossible. Perhaps I’m just not good enough at the tactical element but I still won some matches by just ignoring my gate and racing to theirs quickly enough. On the other hand, because it’s so difficult to do, when you do successfully destroy a boulder before it hits your gate – something that only happened about three times in my play through – it is incredibly satisfying and gives a real sense of achievement.
Once you’ve finished the campaign there’s still lots to do, like taking on redesigned versions of each level in the time-trial, obstacle course and skeeball modes. There’s also an online leader board if you’re into that sort of thing. Steam achievements and hidden keys on each level complete the plethora of reasons to keep playing the game.
All in all Rock of Ages is a fun but flawed game. What sets it apart is that the team behind it obviously had a great deal of fun making it and a whole lot of affection for the project. This grants the game a joyous and energetic feel that a lot of other titles miss out on. Most people (outside Katamari fans) may not think that playing a giant rolling object would be a particularly interesting thing: Rock of Ages may convince them otherwise, and at £7 I think it’s well worth giving a go.
Buy the game here.
Ben RL Meredith 
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