Review: Rochard

Not at all what I was expecting. When you hear the title Rochard you think of something discreet, something possibly French, something with gravity based platforming and shooting (okay, I knew that before I went in). You expect an experimental, traditionally classy game.

Instead we have John St. John straight playing a redneck, overweight space miner named John Rochard who shoots a lot of people with his gun and a completely ridiculous plot about space Native Americans. The game’s made by a company based in Finland. I don’t know what to make of this.

The juicy center of Rochard is its gravity gun mechanic. For the first hour of the game, it’s gleeful, with you using it to pick up and throw crates at bastards and solving simple block movement puzzles. Surprisingly, not a lot of physics based puzzles are on offer for the duration of the experience, but that doesn’t devalue the gravity gun. It’s a satisfying mechanic. Items feel like they have weight, and it works.

Then you get the ability to turn off gravity and make everything weightless, and even this is a good choice. The two mechanics synergize: you can throw crates beneath you to jump to extraordinary heights, you can scale massive heights with a wonderful sense of weightlessness. These two mechanics give the game a nice core and you wonder what they can do with it. Frantic encounters where you deflect bullets with crates, throw explosives at enemies, and leap across rooms in a single bound? Sounds good, right?

Then the developers see fit to give you a gun, and the game goes downhill.

Here’s Rochard in a nutshell: the developers took two really good ideas (combat and puzzles with objects hoisted by the gravity gun, weightlessness to allow this sort of combat to take the form of redneck ballet) and then had absolutely no faith in them. No, they said, gamers will never buy a game with frantic gunless combat and gleeful weightless jumping! Look at Dead Space. That’s what gamers are going to compare it to. Isaac Clarke was a miner, but he had a gun. Therefore, John Rochard has to have a gun.

And thus we have a subtle game mechanically reduced to a run and shoot with promised, but never delivered, Metroidvania trappings. You can use crates and explosives and your gravity gun to fight your battles, but why would you when you could shoot enemies? Hokey crates and gravity are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid. I could get killed trying to throw a crate at an enemy, or I could kill him with three blaster shots, duck, and regenerate my health. The blaster is only truly necessary for opening three doors at the beginning of the game, so I get the distinct impression this is a very late addition for when the developers lacked faith in their ideas. This is reaffirmed by a general lack of things you need blasters for: bosses. As someone staunchly anti-boss, Rochard needed more bosses than it got.

With the compelling mechanic undermined, the weight of the game falls on narrative and charm, and Rochard falls flat. John St. John saying, “Git ‘er done!”, comedy drawn from Blue Collar TV, and a Claudia Black imitating female lead don’t do it for me. Remember when I said the developer’s from Finland? I have no idea what to make of this. It’s too serious to be parody, and it’s too off the mark to be serious. Suffice it to say, there’s a space artifact, a turn of coincidence, a villain who hams it up with the ultimate villain name, and “Git ‘er done!”

I’ll admit to chuckling a bit at the big plot reveals for the sheer audacity of them, but there’s really no story here. There’s no weight to it

Rochard feels like a game that lacks punctuation. Even with the gun everything flows nicely, but there’s no real reason to do anything. You complete a level set in a mine filled with enemies and then you go to another place, perhaps a mine retrofitted as a casino, and you kill generic enemies until you get to the end, where you’ll go somewhere else. There’s no roller coaster; there aren’t even bumps in the road.

That leaves Rochard in an awkward place. It’s a game which undermines its main mechanic to the point where it’s a lighter weight Shadow Complex with some very simple physics and “throw this object through that force field” puzzles but that also misses on story. It doesn’t do anything particularly wrong, but it doesn’t hit any notes that I’ll remember a week from now, either. For its price ($10) it might be a worthwhile little diversion to folk who enjoy “You Might Be a Redneck” humor, but everyone else should, reluctantly, give it a pass. And possibly feel bad that more games won’t have the traditional Indian Burial Ground in space.