The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Awhile back, using free Microsoft points I got from a cheap Live Gold card, I bought Rock of Ages, because it looked silly.

It was silly.

Rock of Ages is an amazing game, but it is also a very flawed game. The campaign is not very fun. The AI is either steamrolled or does the steamrolling, and it rarely felt, to me, like there was anything in between. I didn’t get very far in the campaign because of this.

However, Essner and I played splitscreen versus for a whole afternoon once, and that was a blast. This was not just because I won most of the games, because I did have an advantage for a lot of it, seeing as I understood how the game worked. This was because the game is exciting and tense against human opponents. You can actually trick them, or trip them up with your builds. A human player can’t just decide to be able to make pixel-perfect turns whenever they need to. It’s pretty great.

Rock of Ages is basically a really, really weird tower defenseish game. You start by building defenses on a path to where your leader is housed. These are things like catapults, that deal damage, towers, which are barricades that have to be destroyed if someone wants through, or cows, which work to push things out of the way. You build until your boulder is ready, and then you roll the boulder down the track your opponent just filled with traps to try to hit their gate at a high speed and, eventually, kill them. This system is a bit flawed: It’s hard not to break the gate after three hits, even if you do terrible. It more comes down to slowing the opponent down so you get that third hit in before they do.

Again, these traps and the strategy they make are just stupid against an AI opponent, but when you can really mix up your strategy, and switch in the middle of the match to totally throw your human opponent, who is incapable of robotic maneuvering off? Or when you somehow slip past a horrible gauntlet of seemingly inescapable traps without a scratch? It’s totally fun. It helps that the game is kind of this super silly mashup of internet memes, history, and Monty Python animations as well. It looks fun, and it is fun again your friends. I got my money’s worth on that afternoon of versus play, personally. I may never play it again, or may only play more versus, but I had a really good time.