Review

Rochard

As Recoil’s first go at making video games, Rochard is a solid experience and a definite step in the right direction for downloadable games as a whole. Very few download titles include a complete storyline with voiceovers while also offering solid gameplay. Rochard delivers on both!

The story of space miner John Rochard and the crew on his out-of-luck mining rig starts off strong and with an interesting cast of characters. However, halfway through the narrative started feeling rushed and the conclusion was a little baffling. But apart from those minor issues and the few moments of uneven voice acting the story was enjoyable. I particularly liked how the characters would converse during gameplay. It always makes the game world feel more complete.

The puzzles and action are physics-based and will have you manipulating gravity and objects with your G-Lifter gun. The platforming and physics feel tight and behave how you would expect. The main snag is the amount of button presses needed to pull off some stunts. Say you want to jump while holding a box in low gravity, throw the box at an enemy, then switch to your gun and shoot another enemy after a second jump. All while avoiding flying bullets. The only thing the left hand can control is gravity and movement. Aiming, switching weapons, jumping and firing is all for the right. Basically, be prepared to tangle up your right hand’s fingers and get the actions backwards if you try any extravagant moves. It’s not broken or bad and it will mostly be your own dang fault. It can just get frustrating at times, which, if we are being honest with ourselves, is the definition of a platform game anyway.

When you aren’t trying to pull the fancy maneuvers and inadvertently killing yourself (it will happen a lot), the game lends a challenge all of its own. Puzzle difficulty ramps up smoothly and gets quite tricky. On the other hand, the enemies seem to be on the same difficulty level throughout. They are simply there to get in the way of puzzle solving. It probably has to do with the health. Heath is regenerated only when the character isn’t getting hit. But enemies are placed so strategically as to make it extremely hard to find cover while in the middle of the action. This is a brilliant design move because it does away with health packs while simultaneously keeping the difficulty as hard as a game that has them. There are stations to upgrade the health bar but the enemies switch to better guns by the time it is upgraded enough to make a difference.

The levels looked great throughout, graphics-wise, though it would have been nice to see a little more variation in locations. Being inside a space mining rig inside an asteroid is cool and all, but it is SPACE. There are all kinds of interesting possibilities that can be explored there. Basically, the whole game just left me wanting to see more: more of the characters, more of the story, and more areas in the world. Recoil needs to make a sequel ASAP. With more outer space in it!