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| Rochard Review Saturday, October 6, 2012 1:48 pm — Posted by FlashMarsh |
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General Information
Time to beat (Standard): 5hrs
Time to beat (Completionist): est. 8hrs
Time to beat (Speedrun): 2.5hrs
Difficulty: Infantile
Price: £7.99 (as of 6/10/12)
Genre: Puzzle Platformer
I got Rochard from the recent Humble Indie Bundle 6. I had heard good things about it, but (spoilers!!) unfortunately it did not live up to my expectations. Nebnebben, I don't care about what you say, I really don't like this game. So what are the problems with this game?
So, to start, what is up with this game? You play as John Rochard (pronounced Roe-Shard , dammit), a cool dude who is mining an asteroid for a company called Skyrig. The mechanics start off with a simple grav-gun (called the G-Lifter to avoid getting sued) morphed with the physics gun from Garry's Mod. You can pick up objects (mostly crates, switches or droids) and you can throw them, drop them, whatever you want. You also can turn the level to low gravity, allowing you to jump absurdly high and pick up heavy objects. You gain various abilities for your G-Lifter throughout the game. You gain a little gun on it called the Rock Blaster, the ability to shoot three different kinds of grenades (normal, sticky, anti-gravity) and the ability to wrench turrets from the walls and pick up humans. I hope I didn't miss anything. If I did, it wasn't very significant. Most of the puzzles use various mechanics with lifts, forcefields (red allows objects but not living things through, blue only allows living things through, orangey-yellow allows nothing through), and switches. Lots of switches.
Probably the games biggest weakness is that the game is far too easy. the majority of the game's 'puzzles' I barely count as puzzles. At least to me, throwing crates out of the way of a door is not a puzzle because it doesn't offer any kind of challenge to even the kinds of people who suck at puzzle games like myself. I reckon that this 'puzzle' was re-used at least five times throughout the game - Throw crates out of the way, chuck switch through red forcefield. Put switch in socket. Done. The only time that the game ever even felt challenging was the second laser puzzle, which actually managed to kill me a couple of times, and it took me more than two minutes to 'solve'. The combat was easy too, especially if you just blasted your way through with your gun, which is far easier but also much more boring than actually killing people in funny/cool/interesting/positive adjective ways, which I tried to do. I'll talk more about how much the combat sucks later.
I think I'll break up all my negativity with a nice, happy bouncy positive paragraph. Yay. The voice acting from the protaganist is great (and it's done by the guy who did Duke Nukem's voice acting) and the antagonist's voice acting is very solid too. The female lead, Skyler, sometimes doesn't sound quite so great, but I've heard much, much worse. I think the problem with it was that she was either doing a fake British accent or greatly exaggerating it, and it sounded pretty bad sometimes.
...But despite the great voice talent, the story was absolutely terrible. [Spoiler warning, not that you should care] The story is that you've been mining for years and found none of some random valuable resource, and that you're about to be all sacked. Suddenly (!!!!!!) you get attacked by a gang of space-thugs called The Wild Boyz (you never know whether it has a 'z' or an 's', but boyz sounds more hardcore). Then Maximilian comes along with the SkyPolice, but then you find out that Maximilian is evil and that both the SkyPolice and the Wild Boyz want to kill you pretty badly. -time skip- You save Skyler from a bomb by putting it in an orange forcefield, and it blows open the entrance to some ancient temple, and then I stopped listening whilst they droned on about some crap about Native Americans. You for some reason need a disk, so you go to Skyler's uncle, who you then find out has lost the disk in a poker game to Maximilian. You then go through hundred of air vents while murdering thousands and solving 'puzzles', retrieve the disk, then Maximilian somehow gets the disk back (I don't really know how to be honest, I was getting bored of the story by this point) and transforms into a Native American god. You then proceed to kill him. Then the F***ING ENDING. It is so bad! You kill Maximilian, and then you go HOORAY and then boom, you go into a portal, disappear, end of the game. WHAT THE HELL. Deomon26 says that 'The ending sucks balls'. I rest my case.
At least the soundtrack was good. It has one of the most varied soundtracks for a game that I've ever heard, from Blues to Orchestral. Thumbs up to Markus Kaarlonen, who apparently composed the sound track. Oh, and the graphics were pretty nice. It has a really cool 2.5d feel to it, and the graphics look very polished throughout the game. I guess that the enviroments could have been more varied, however.
I promised that I'd tell you about the combat, so I will. I was having plenty of fun crushing people with boxes, but then they ruin everything by adding this goddamn gun. I didn't really mind the grenades so much, but for me, the gun completely ruined the combat, especially when it is the optimal way to fight, even with boxes around.
Controls were pretty good. Then again, I don't really see how you can muck them up at all in bloody platformer... Oh wait Super Meat Boy using the keyboard. Options were pretty basic, but you don't really need them that much. It offers Windowed mode, quite a few resolutions, music volume, sound effects volume, ambient volume, gamma correction, subtitles and language. Oh and everything can be rebinded, which is good too.
In terms of length/cost, Rochard is pretty bad for an indie, but alright for a bigger budget game. But remember kids, quality over quantity. It offers you the ability to get these gold collectibles, but to be honest they seemed to all be pretty easy, and almost none involved extra puzzles, just annoying platforming and sometimes some exploration.
Overall, the game was not that great and I definitely would not reccommend it to people, especially with so many indie puzzle platformers around these days.
User Comments (3)
| Yaya | ||
Age: 29 Karma: 747 Posts: 5367 Location: Ohio (US) pm | email |
Some screenies would be nice.  COMING SOON: A giant meteor. Please. Give me +karma. Give me +karma. | |
| Livio | ||
Age: 31 Karma: 470 Posts: 9620 Gender: Male Location: Arizona, USA pm | email |
I read this as if it was written by Angry Video Game Nerd. I actually played the demo to this game a while ago. I enjoyed the story somewhat and appreciated the voice acting, but I felt like it was just there to provide a premise for what was going on in the game. I hoped that it would later turn into something more than just "stuff happening", but according to your review that doesn't look like it happened. I liked the idea behind the game's mechanics, and it's fun to find interesting solutions to problems with the gravity gun. But like you said, it's not very challenging, which is kinda disappointing. | |
| FlashMarsh | ||
Age: 25 Karma: 99 Posts: 2727 Gender: Male Location: UK pm | email |
I was debating with Ben (nebnebben) earlier about this game. He says that it doesn't matter that the actual gameplay is lackluster, because the game is all about the aesthetics, however I didn't really think that the main thing that can excuse bad gameplay in my opinion (story, eg. heavy rain) was pretty bad. | |
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