ACE Team, the studio behind the bizarre fighter Zeno Clash, has teamed up once again with publisher Atlus to bring you a fresh offering of weird in Rock of Ages. This time around, you won’t be dealing with those Father-Mothers, you’ll instead be escorting King Sisyphus and his boulder through the annauls of European history.
Gameplay
This is the part of the review, where you’re expecting to learn about what genre(s) the game is most likely to find itself comfortably situated in. I can’t really do that with Rock of Ages because it’s quite a bizarre cocktale. Its recipe consists of one part tower defense, one part platformer, two parts Super Monkey Ball meets Katamari Damacy, and more than a dash of what the fuck. I suppose I could take the easy way out and just tell you it’s the best roll-playing game of the year.
The game begins by having you assist Sisyphus escape from Hades. I know it sounds challenging, but don’t worry, he’s got a plan. You’ll simply roll the enormous stone of ages through the area, destroying anything in its way, and eventually ramming into the gates of hell until they are breached. You’ll have then succeeded in unleashing Sisyphus the douche King, and his boulder onto the world of the living, kudos.
From this point forward the story mode of the game takes on its true form. Through roughly twenty levels your objective will be to roll the giant bolder through various symmetrical maps and crush in the doors of your historically relevant adversaries. That said, you’ve got a door to worry about yourself, and your aformentioned adversaries have also acquired the secrets of boulder technology. This is where the tower defense attributes of the game come into play.
You’ll start every encounter with a nice pile of money but no boulder. As the slaves toil away carving both teams their respective granite globes you’ll have the opportunity to place defenses throughout the map. There are all sorts of defenseive structures you can place; towers, mines, trebuchets, the occasional bit of live stock, and even fans to blow your opponents balls off course. What is unfathomably absent from this manifestation of the bizarre are giant sheets of paper — perhaps they felt paper always beating rock, would simply be game breaking. The tower defense portion of the game could have been great and even stolen the show to some degree from the rock-crushes-everything theme of the game. Alas the units themselves are woefully underpowered and getting your bolder rolling again as soon as possible is of central importance, the result is an experience that seems so watered down its very existence is questionable. My gut feeling is that the defenses were possibly scaled back towards the end of development to keep matches from running for hours instead of the six or so minutes they average currently, but this is really just a guess.
The last bastion of fun in Rock of Ages is clearly the “wreck up the joint” angle. Tearing up shit just for the sake of tearing it up. Unfortunately, this was also rendered pointless, as spending any measurable amount of time doing so within a match is more or less a forfeit of the match on the players part. In principle the system was intended to reward you for destroying elements of the environment with money, which in turn could be used to buy defenses so you could make up the time spent by delaying your opponent. As we just learned, however, the flaccid nature of the game’s defensive units makes this a formula for failure.
What you’ve been left with is a wrecking ball game, where wrecking things is punitively rewarded, and a towerdefense game where defensive structures can simply be circumvented. There is nothing left but a racing angle, and nothing makes for a more exciting race than watching enormous sluggardly objects competing in a test of speed.
On the bright side, they did actually make you feel a bit like you were taking on a Sisyphean task, by the end of the game you feel as though you’ve rolled that fucking bolder around an eternity yourself. This is somewhat of an accomplishment for the physics and controls doing a great job of communicating the sheer mass of the object, every movement, every nuanced act of trajectory change, feels as though it requires a herculean effort.
Many of the issues found in Rock of Ages could have been pretty simply addressed. The game could have featured a handful of different styles of match throughout the story mode. Perhaps a stage where the singular objective was to wreck everything in sight and cause a specific amount of mayhem. I am ultimately left feeling as though the full conecept wasn’t entirely realized by the designers.
There are a pretty good assortment of alternative gameplay options. In addition to the story mode, consisting of twenty or so levels and a handful of boss battles, there is also Skee Boulder (it is exactly what you think it is), and couch/online versus modes. So while the story mode is beatable in an afternoon, your mileage should be a bit longer than that.
Audio/Visual
The visuals of Rock of Ages are the game’s saving grace. This is without a doubt the primary reason you should boot this game up. The art and animation is presented in a very Terry Gilliam-esq style. The art assets are derived from famous works throughout history and portray the historical figures in their own period appropriate styles. Even the maps themselves are filled with assets and archetecture that matche the era the famous opposition called home. The cutscenes of the game are also quite Monty Python, so it’ll likely be hit and miss with various audiences — there’s only so much of the general population you can entertain with toots. So you’ll either have to be fairly well versed in European history or a flatulence fanatic to get a really proper chortle out of the game. Unfortunately the games lack of difficulty modes, makes it a tough sell as a tourist style game for the non-gamers. My European history fanatic father would enjoy its art and subject matter immensely but couldn’t manage its gameplay.
The music is equally wonderful, with all setting appropriate tracks for all the various historical periods. Obviously when you’re drawing from classical master works it’s hard to go wrong, especially when targeting a fairly sophisticated gamer. The point is, it’s all great, the music is sublime and the sound effects don’t intrude yet stay appropriately communicative.
Summary
The writers, artists, animators, and audio folk over at ACE Team really deserve a tip of the hat for carrying the Rock of Ages game into the realm of the recommended. If not for their efforts, the gameplay would have sunk this game like a stone, but for fans of smart Monty Python like humor that requires that you minored in European History certainly worth the investment. Those of you who are looking for wrecking ball fun on the other hand, are best looking elsewhere to satisfy your destructive compulsions. Rock of Ages is available now on XBLA for 800 Microsoft Points and will be available on Steam September 7th for the introductory price of $8.99.
