Rock of Ages rocks

I've just beaten Rock of Ages, a bizarre bowling, platforming, tower defense, marble madness Monthy Pythonesque race game. Its genre is hard to define, which makes it somewhat hard to talk about the game, but it's a very neat game so it's definitely worth talking about.

Clearly a regular Tower Defense game

Rock of Ages starts off with Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology, as he performs his eternal task of rolling a boulder up a hill in Tartarus only for it to fall downhill right before he makes it to the top, forcing him to roll it up again.

Poor Sisyphus.

Of course that rather sucks, so Sisyphus and his boulder at one point decide they've had enough and could use the force from rolling downhill at great speed into the literal gates of hell would be a far better idea. After making their way out of Hell, the two travel the lands whilst for some reason getting caught up in boulderfights with all sorts of characters from history, mythology or the arts, where each side tries to destroy the gates to the other's castle to flatten their enemy whilst also placing defenses such as towers, ballistae and dynamite to stop the enemy's boulder and hopefully crush it before it ever makes it to their gate.

This was almost as bad as the time he tried to conquer Russia.

The journey is essentially a travel through time, where the game is divided into five sections which are each defined by a certain time period and an art stream which is connected to that period, so the game begins in Ancient Greece, but in the next world you'll be in Medieval times and further on you'll enter the Renaissance as Plato and Aristotle literally rise from their graves.

Quite the variety

The story is told through short cinematics which use a style similar to that of Terry Gilliam of Monthy Python where famous artistic renditions and paintings are animated into historical in-jokes, spoofs of popular media and plenty of slapstick humour, which results in cutscenes which are so bizarre and ridiculous that it's hard for it not to appeal to someone in some way. The cutscenes alone are worth checking out, they're that bizarre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zay_e8zvyd4

A view of a day in the life of Ares

Once in battle you'll be able to place various defenses in your side of the field while the enemy places defenses on their field, the fields are mirrored versions of the other, and once their boulder is prepared they can roll their boulder and if they saved enough money buy an upgrade to their boulder. Once in control of your boulder you try to make your way to the enemy gates while avoiding being destroyed by their defenses and crushing enemy structures and art objects in order to make money to create more defenses next round. Once the enemy gate is hit or your boulder is crushed you go back to placing more defenses while a new boulder is prepared until one played managed to break the other's gate and crush the opposing player, the number of boulders it takes to crush the gate depending on the level of crackedness and velocity of the boulder as it hits the gate.

Rarrr

The concept sounds easy enough, but actually playing turns out to be a lot harder than it seems since you need to place your defenses cleverly to prevent the enemy from rolling right past them or using shortcuts you left exposes, while rolling the boulder requires apt mastery of the physics engine and knowing the best way to roll and jump past enemy defenses, it's quite fun to see which player makes it to the other's gate first or to see your opponent's boulder get crushed in the upper right of the screen because of your well-placed defenses.

Man's greatest achievements laid bare

The game starts of quite easy and lenient, the maps are simple and don't have many alternate paths while the opponents take longer to create their boulders and roll them to the gate, but as the game goes on more and better types of defenses are introduces, levels become more complex with more possible paths, devious map layouts and difficult but rewarding shortcuts while the AI also becomes more competent with their boulders. By the end my boulder cracked more and more often and matches became a lot more tense.

Rockoco

Accompanying the game are a wonderful blend of 2D visuals taken from famous artwork and animated as sprites with era-appropriate 3D graphics for the map, structures and background, it really does feel like you're experiencing and going through a certain art period, and the music which takes heavy cues from music styles suiting those eras really adds to the game, Medieval times comes with appropriate instruments while you can feel the opulence while going through the Rococo levels.My favourite track has to be the amazingly titled "Let us win and be famous in history" track from the Renaissance area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGC-l8Rns9w

Just a regular Goya painting...
With boulders

All-in-all it's a pretty rock-solid game, the single-player is enough to satisfy someone for a few evenings and the game has local and online multiplayer functionality as well with several game-modes such as Castle War, which is like the regular gameplay, Obstacle Course which is trying to race though the course filled with obstacles, Skeeboulder where you race though the map and try to hit targets along the way and position the boulder into the right slot to score points and a single-player only Time Trial which lets you test how quickly you can make it through a stage without any obstacles. I imagine I'd play the multiplayer mode if I had someone I could play with, seems like the sort of thing you might come back to every once in a while since it's such a novel game, though I don't know anyone who might read this blog who has the game. *wink wink*

Skeeboulder in action

The game's definitely worth checking out if it sounds like fun, it's normally 10 euros, but during discount periods it goes as low as 80% so it only costs 2, which is a really good deal given the amount of fun you can have with the game. It's actually currently 80% off, so, you know. *nudge nudge*

Howdy! I'm Happy Boulder! Happy Boulder the Boulder!

In this world, it's crush or be crushed!

Oh, and have a happy 2016.