Review: Rock of Ages

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Let’s not talk about the Terry Gilliamisms. Those are lovely, and why you’ve already played the game. If you haven’t, and you appreciate Monty Python, here is my six word review for you: go watch Life of Brian again. If you’ve watched it a hundred times, maybe get Rock of Ages.

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Rock of Ages shares a lineage with its developer’s previous title, Zeno Clash, in that its taking a major genre (the Katamari, possibly Marble Madness, though it’s sold as Katamari) and mixing it with another genre (tower defense). They skipped an important step, though, early on in the process, something very critical: they didn’t pay attention to what made each genre enjoyable to play.

See, close examination reveals that both genres run around very simple core principles, and that these principles are diametrically opposed to each other. The Katamari genre is predicated around the ability to destroy everything in your path; tower defense is based around watching the creeping attack die a horrible death.

This might seem like a good dynamic. Were the game single player, it could be balanced as such, so that the player has fun doing both of these things. Players could run their own boulder down the enemy’s track, smashing everything in their path, and then defeat the opponent’s boulder with his towers. A wrinkle is added: by destroying an enemy’s structures, you gain money to spend on more towers. What should happen is a tense game of inches where you whittle away an opponent’s defenses to build your own up.

Instead what we have is a racing game. Here is how every match proceeds: you rush your boulder down the enemy track, jumping over/jumping off the side to respawn past the defenses. You build towers not for any practical reason but instead because of a sick sense of responsibility; you build towers because you have money, and this is a tower defense game.

Now here I will calm the huddled forum masses who will descend upon me like locusts: yes, the towers can do something. Provided with an impeccable sense of placement and strategy, you can do some damage to your opponent, and maybe even stop them forever. The problem, though, is quickly apparent: building fantastic defenses is a strategy in every way inferior (at least in single player) to getting down the opponent’s track as fast as possible. If you do not outright destroy the opponent’s ball, something I’ve done twice in the whole of the single player campaign, then they’ll hit your gate. Even the smallest ball will destroy your tower in four hits, and each time down the track it destroys your towers, salts the earth, and forces you to use less ideal defensive positions, all while completely wasting the towers you’ve built already; a line of towers isn’t very effective with a gaping, ball sized hole in it.

Admittedly as the game progresses it opens up. As your opponent becomes better at slowing you down, you have to become better at slowing them down. Or you have to become better at driving, which is difficult since the ball goes in a straight line and turns like…a ball. That, and, as there’s absolutely no penalty for falling off the side besides time and the game often places you behind enemy defenses, there’s no reason to turn). There’s an increasing level of complexity, but it doesn’t work to make either half of the game particularly fun. You have an overly weighty Katamari that tries to make you strike a balance between speed and resource collection except speed is the only aspect really worthwhile; on the other hand, you have a tower defense game where it’s nigh impossible to succeed, where the game flat out doesn’t want you to succeed.

It throws you a final indignity in the form of boss fights. Rather than ape the tower defense boss, the incredibly difficult enemy that has to be stopped on a track, or make like Katamari or Marble Madness and realize boss fights are unnecessary, instead this game cribs from Super Monkey Ball 2. Instead of something enjoyable you have the maddening frustration of trying to drive your ball up a hill studded with pegs to creep up a ramp into a cannon to be shot at a slowly rotating Michelangelo’s David. Hitting a work of art in its floppy stone man bits is funny once. It’s less funny when you have to repeat it, when you have to fight a battle where the chance of success is minimal, where the threat of death is even more remote. No challenge, no reward.

Looking at Rock of Ages objectively, though, this conclusion was inevitable: this is the case of an irresistible force, the Katamari, against the unmovable object, the tower defense. It would be like trying to combine a racing game with a turn based strategy: the traditionally “fun” elements of both genres are opposed, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, to make it work. Rock of Ages attempts to defy the laws of the universe, but despite its pretty substantial charm it cracks and comes apart too soon.