Some series are obscure, niche titles due to their outlandish difficulty or coming from strange lands like Japan or Europe. You may have missed the Rock of Ages franchise if you’re not a connoisseur of art history, European history, or “lol so random” humor. But if you want to roll a giant wheel of cheese down a hill, win the round, and get a cutscene in Monty Python-style animation, this is your best option.
I am unfamiliar with the previous installments but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the core gameplay is really simple: You have a giant, heavy thing like a rock, a ball of sheep, or even a tremendous cheese. You roll it downhill through a number of obstacles. Ideally, at the end of the run, it smashes into something in a satisfying fashion.
Rock of Ages 3 gets quite a lot out of this simple formula. There’s a story mode. This installment involves history and mythology, so imagine if Odysseus escaped the Cyclops by making a giant ball out of his sheep, steering it carefully through the trap-strewn cave, and smashing through the boulder that guards the entrance. Imagine further if the story was told through Monty Python-style animations with cheese ball humor from Odysseus’ buddy Elpenor as he “wonders” (that’s the way it is in the press materials!) through time with the namesake Rock of Ages, smashing things.
Once you’ve completed a truly epic saga, there’s 2-player local and 4-player online multiplayer. These further break down into six different game modes. There’s War, where you build defenses, your opponent builds defenses, and then you take turns smashing them. There’s Obstacle, where you race to score points over an obstacle course. Avalanche, where you must defend a location against waves of boulders. In Time Trial, you navigate an obstacle course as a bomb and try to reach the end before it explodes. Humpty Dumpty has you navigating the fragile egg-creature through an obstacle course. Lastly, there’s skeeball, where you roll through a course into rings at the end of the track for points and, I only assume, giant overpriced stuffed animals that cost way too many tickets.
There’s also a level editor and a surprisingly robust set of community-made levels for more smashing action.
I am admittedly unfamiliar with the oeuvre of the previous 2 installments of the series, so can’t comment on continuity or overall flow with the Rock of Ages canon, like whether it includes the Tom Cruise-fronted movie musical. Purists, be gentle.
This could be a good “stuck in the house since we’re currently in the middle of a worldwide pandemic” game, with both local and online multiplayer and a variety of game modes. It’s simple to explain: build stuff, smash other people’s stuff. And while figuring out how to play is easy–keep rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ (YEAH!)–mastering the handling of the giant boulders is a little tricky. It’s not F1 racing, but then, F1 racing has never explained Greek mythology to me, so who cares about it?
