Sometimes a game comes along that seems like it’s hitting all the right marks. You like the concept, the aesthetics and the music. All the still images and preview videos get you really amped up for the game’s release. But alas, once you’ve played it, it just doesn’t click with you.

I am sad to say that was my experience with Rock of Ages. A game that, on the surface, had enough elements that seemed interesting and unique to me that I thought for sure I would like the game. I was wrong.

Rock of Ages combines tower defense elements with a Marble Madness style ball rolling game. You, as Sisyphus, grew tired of rolling that rock eternally up a hill and decided to break out of Hades via a time vortex that Chronos was guarding. As you progress through time, you will come across all manner of unsavory historical figures who are trying to stop you for some inexplicable reason.

The resulting encounter becomes a contest of who can smash the other person’s door in first and squish the opponent inside with their giant boulder. But each boulder must be carved from a solid piece of stone. While you wait, you can spend money, earned from smashing things on your way to the opponent’s door, on your own defenses. More often than not, the defenses will serve mainly to slow down your opponent. But if you can deal enough damage, you can actually break apart their boulder completely.

That is the tower defense portion of the game, and it is where I found the most frustration. While potentially there were a lot of different ways in which you could setup various units, you are in such a time and budget crunch that it generally resulted in madly placing what few things I could without really doing much planning. The AI on the other had, knows exactly what units to place where. This leads them to spend most of their resources defending shortcuts; ones I wouldn’t have noticed were there otherwise. So while this should have made the battles harder, all it really did was expose weaknesses in the levels. Nearly every match I won on the first or second try, even if it was almost always by a close margin.

At least until I got to Plague. Ah Plague, the one big difficulty spike in the game that nearly resulted in an incident involving me and the pulling out of hair. It wasn’t until my pal Adam Milecki revealed his winning strategy that I was able to continue my progression. The problem was the strategy he suggested, spam the war elephants, pretty much worked in every situation from that point on.

The other major part of the game is where you are rolling the ball down the hill towards your opponent’s gate. If you’ve played Marble Madness or Marble Blast Ultra then you should feel right at home with the controls. I enjoyed this part of the game more than the tower defense mechanics. Skillfully rolling your boulder while dodging the harmful and smashing the smashable felt pretty good. One could argue that this is the main mechanic in the game. In fact, I didn’t even know about the tower defense mechanics existing until Rock of Ages had already come out. This portion felt exactly how I thought it would and, while fun at first, didn’t have a lot of staying power.

Boss fights seem to rarely work out these days. We may all have ones we remember fondly from back in the day, but they seem to rarely be good now. The boss fights in Rock of Ages are not designed to have you worry about defeating the boss before he defeats you. Rather, they are a matter of figuring out how to hit the boss to take down his health. You don’t have a health bar on these parts and if you fall off the edge, you will be placed back on the playing field unharmed. This made them feel really pointless on one hand, but on the other hand I was kind of glad you couldn’t lose. I really, really didn’t want to be stuck on them.

The aesthetic aspects of Rock of Ages are great. I love how the style changes as you progress through the ages, I love the use of music, and I especially love the sense of humor. The title screen opens with a Mystery Science Theater 3000 reference, and how could I not love that? The cut scenes between levels are completely off the wall and are filled with pop culture references and random crazyness. The Monty Python style artwork is fantastic.

Rock of Ages also has multiplayer, but I was unable to try it for this review. I attempted to connect to a multiplayer match via Xbox Live several times, but I could not find any games to connect to, nor did anyone connect to my game when I tried to host. There is local split screen matches as well, but I was not able to try those either.

Overall, I found myself frustrated with Rock of Ages. As I mentioned above, I really wanted to like this game. Unfortunately, I just found the mechanics more frustrating than fun.

This review is based on the Xbox 360 version of Rock of Ages provided to the reviewer by Atlus.

Tags: Ace Team, Atlus, Marble Blast Ultra, Marble Madness, PC, Rock of Ages, tower defense, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2011 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.