Picking Up Steam: Rock of Ages (PC)
In Greek myth, Sisyphus is a man who constantly defied death. Whether it was kidnapping the god of death that meant no one on Earth could die or tricking Persephone into releasing him from the underworld, it’s little surprise he earned special torment once they actually managed to keep him locked in the afterlife. Cursed by Hades to forever try to push a boulder to the top of a hill only for it to always roll back down before it reached the peak, Rock of Ages sees Sisyphus once again getting crafty about avoiding his eternal punishment. That giant rock he’s been rolling is, after all, a perfect means of flattening and ramming anything that blocks his path back to life, this action and tower defense mix of a game about trying to help Sisyphus keep that death defying going for as long as possible.
Rock of Ages is more a historical farce with bits of myth sprinkled in. Serving as a bit of a comedic tour of European history, Sisyphus’s quick escape from the underworld shifts to him clashing with various historical figures like Napoleon and Leonardo da Vinci as well as an embodiment of the Black Plague and Michael the Archangel. A good deal of the art is derived from classical paintings with a bit of deliberate stiffness as if they were indeed art pieces come to life, but the game’s humor aims to deliberately undermine that class with corny whimsy and memetic references. You can expected a full bore “THIS IS SPARTA!” reference when you encounter Leonidas and the 300 Spartans, and other points try to find an in for references to The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings. You can feel the cutscenes struggling to make certain historical figures funny though, leaning a bit on jokes that you figure out immediately but still need to see the rest of the scene play out. With every opposing character screaming like a little girl when you get ready to squish them with your boulder, it feels like it’s not a type of humor with a lot of cleverness but one that can be cute in the small doses it’s dished out in. The historical focus also leads to a good deal of nice backgrounds and some classical music that underscores the actual action well like the Anvil Chorus and Mozart’s Dies Irae.
When it’s time to get the ball rolling, you’ll need to use your giant boulder to smash through the gates protecting the enemy commander. Fortunately, they’re downhill, but getting to them is not a straightforward roll. The path to the gate is your first obstacle, the different periods in European history also coming with some variety in the locales you face them in. To hit the gate with maximum force you’ll need to build up speed and preserve your boulder’s mass, each jump you take along the way chipping your rock ever so slightly and contact with certain objects causing greater damage. Falling off course is unpunished beyond the time it takes to put you back on course, but since the enemy will be trying to roll down a mirrored version of the same course to smash your gates, it’s time you don’t want to waste. This leads to the levels having some layouts that add some interesting risk and reward elements. One course for example has a large river in the middle, it slow and safe while the roads that let you actually build speed involve a lot of jumping. Some places will have a thin high ground that might be faster or safer if you can manage it, and shortcuts can often involve some tricky jumping and proper momentum building to clear whatever gaps there might be.
Admittedly, on their own, the levels themselves aren’t doing much to impede you. Every stage does have 3 keys to collect, but not only do you only need a small handful to get past progression gates, but grabbing a key once will save it even if you quit or restart, meaning you can always do key collection separately. Some keys are all too easy to grab during regular play and others are positioned high in the air or in other tricky spots, but many stages in Story mode can be cleared while grabbing all three keys partly because it’s hard to stop a smart human player from smashing the gates with their boulder before the sloppier computer-controlled opponents. Technically, there is another obstacle to smashing the gates, that being where Rock of Ages plays into its tower defense side. Smashing the gates will take more than one boulder roll, but after one hits the gates (or in an unlikely event, gets fully destroyed), you’ll need time for the next rock to be chiseled. During that time, you are free to spend the money you earn by breaking objects or flattening people along the way to the gate, both sides encouraged to build fortifications to try and slow and damage the opposing ball.
The problem with the building phase is how futile it can often feel. You can’t build too close to the gate which makes sense since it would make it too easy to protect, but the spaces you can place things are limited and your tools for defense not the greatest. You start off with only a few cheap options, things like cows that try to push the boulder and flimsy towers that can be splintered easily enough. You’ll eventually get things like explosive barrels that can deal damage if a rock foolishly rolls into them, and since objects can’t be placed too close together, it can be hard to force such a thing. Fans can try to blow them off course and are mildly effective, and later high price versions of starting options like the mammoth that replace the cow at least are harder to trivialize. However, even if you do invest in the catapults and balloons that call in air strikes, boulders all too easily can smash the peskiest defenses and the cost for the defender is much higher than the value they’ll get out of their fortifications. They’re not entirely fruitless, level layout can heavily impact their value like thin roads good for blowing a rock off with the fans or stages with shortcuts allowing you to make the faster routes even more dangerous, but also it can be hard to accrue enough cash to really build up a solid defense not just in Story mode but other modes like player vs. player. You can also use some of your money on special ball types that are more durable or have a special effect like a double jump, but it feels like out of fear of having the defenses be too powerful, Rock of Ages instead made it a bit too easy to just jump up and over a lot of them or smash through them without much effort.
The levels of Rock of Ages’s campaign end up losing a lot of their charm because of how difficult it can be for the AI opponents to meaningfully oppose you. They can sometimes be easily bamboozled by a decent defense, but if you aren’t trying to loop key grabbing into a run, it can feel like a lot of levels are going to be straightforward with maybe the rare speed bump before you bash through that surprising bit of effective defense and don’t have to worry again. To try and make up for the repetitiveness of the adventure, there are a few boss fights with “embodiments of the age”, which can rage from a full on dragon to a giant version of Michelangelo’s statue of David. These require more than just trying to roll downhill, although they can have their own issues with weak design. Many of the bosses try to blow you backwards to prevent you from building the momentum needed to hit their weak spot and sometimes it’s just about trying again and again until you get the right speed or time things right between the gaps in their attacks, but some are a touch more interesting. David for example involves you needing to load the ball up into cannon and time the shot right to hit him right in his fig leaf, but the path to the cannons gets a bit more dangerous each time, making missing more dangerous on top of having more to worry about than a single attack or two.
The story is sadly a dull affair because its efforts to iterate don’t change up the action core that much, but Rock of Ages does try to provide a few extra modes with new rules in hopes it can invigorate things a touch. Beyond just playing the standard play with another human, you also have races where both boulders go down the same track and it truly is a test of reaching the end first. With some pre-built defenses added to the standard layout, the race can actually be a bit competitive because even a simple disruption can cause one player to lag behind, the idea working well enough even if it is not strong enough necessarily to revivify this game since you will have to play through the dull story to unlock courses for it. Skee Boulder is a bit of an odd additional mode though, involving the player rolling down the course smashing targets and objects for points and then reaching a large Skeeball based target area. The exact hole you land in will determine the multiplier you get for the round, but there is technically no time limit to a round. In single player this means you might as well break everything down the path at your leisure, but multiplayer adds a wise complication. While you can take your sweet time breaking objects, only the first player to enter the Skeeball holes will get a multiplier, and across three rounds, whoever gets the most points wins. Elements like durability are no longer a concern here, and all things considered, it is a nifty little twist on the Skeeball format. Like with the races though, while it is somewhat effective, it’s not to such a degree that it can serve as the draw, but tinkering with the general shape of the gameplay at least bore some interesting alternatives to the fairly plain main mode.
THE VERDICT: Rock of Ages hits a bit of a brick wall when it comes to trying to vary up its core gameplay style. Despite devoting half of most rounds to building defenses, they’re often flimsy if not almost frivolous when used against you while still making the dim AI even easier to defeat than they already are. Some alternate modes like the racing and Skee Boulder work a bit better with their simpler appeals, but the boulder battles are a bit stingy in letting you interfere with the opponent while the courses themselves are too easy to navigate, making for a repetitive campaign that some irreverent jokes at history’s expense can’t quite lighten up enough to make it worth playing.
And so, I give Rock of Ages for PC…
A BAD rating. As I continue this Picking Up Steam theme of completing games I left unfinished, I’m not left wondering why I dropped this game now that I’ve picked it up again. The core battles are lacking in quite a few areas, the regular rolling not that complicated or skill based unless you want to take really wild shortcuts or grab the four or so deviously placed keys when most are easily grabbed. The level design could have been an interesting complication if the defenses were allowed to be a little more dangerous, many of the defenses you unlock feeling like they’re not worth placing for how easily they’re overcome while others can only do so much to even demand the opponent’s attention. There are some that at least make the defense building sections have some value, but there aren’t as many interesting chokepoints or combos to feel like you’re countering your foe regularly in satisfying ways. Perhaps it is how little money you get for it, or the limited space, or maybe the game would just be frustrating with too much freedom and stronger towers, but Rock of Ages’s current defense options feel a little sheepish in their implementation, afraid to be too important despite demanding time and attention. If there had been other elements to compensate so that there’s a baseline of compelling challenge that gets complicated a touch by the competition’s object placement then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad the tower defense feels lacking, but because it can’t hold its own, a lot of rounds can’t vary up the repeated rolls enough to maintain a good degree of excitement and variety.
I didn’t really have any negative association with my time with Rock of Ages before I dug it back up to finish it, likely because I quit before it could truly grow repetitive. Modes like the racing and Skee Boulder are the kind of thing you’d visit after the main story so their cleaner design wasn’t known to me, but perhaps the historical silliness had the right amount of charm for the short time I spent with it back then. Now though, I can see it’s a cute idea in need of a lot more time considering how to iterate on how it actually unfolds and evolves. One benefit of revisiting old games I never finished though is seeing they’ve had sequels since, there being two Rock of Ages games that came after that maybe will figure out the right mix to make the boulder rolling an idea that doesn’t fizzle out before you’ve even made it that far past the tutorial.