Rock of Ages is not just an '80s hair music production showing at the Pantages Theater in downtown Los Angeles or that musical's big screen adaptation coming to IMAX theaters next month; it’s now an action-strategy game on the PlayStation Network. Rock of Ages, the game, has been available on PC and Xbox Live since last year and now local Los Angeles publisher, Atlus has brought ACE’s addictive game to the PlayStation 3 and with some extras.
Heavily stylized in a Monty Python-ish package, Rock of Ages takes place over five distinct periods of classic art history, starting in classical Greece. Despite its strange packaging, Rock of Ages evokes gameplay similar to the arcade classic Marble Madness or the somewhat more recent Monkey Ball and Katamari games combined with Tower Defense. Rock of Ages is all about rolling huge boulders down a hill to smash open a door and irreverently make splatter out of historical characters like Charlemagne and Vlad the Impaler.
There are two main portions of the game — rolling your boulder down the hill to smash down the gate (and eventually your enemy) and setting up defenses to slow down your opponent’s rock. The boulder is controlled with the left analog stick and the camera can be rotated with the right. You then use the X button to either jump or fly. You will want to smash at least some items on your way without slowing your momentum too much, as they net cash for boulder upgrades and defenses.
While you wait for your minions to cut out another round boulder for you to launch, you have the opportunity to set up obstacles and defenses to protect your castle. Particularly in the beginning, there are but a few strategic choke areas to use but as the maps get more elaborate, there is more opportunity. You can set up animals to ram, missile weapons like catapults to shoot them off course, and towers to slow them down. All of these are, however destructible, more so if your opponent purchased a boulder upgrade.
The PlayStation iteration of the game offers a few new modes of gameplay. In the single player offering there is a Story mode, Time Trial, Skeeball, and Obstacle Course. The story mode creatively concludes the Greek myth of Sisyphus. If you didn’t know or forget, Sisyphus was doomed to rolling a giant boulder up a hill that would always roll back but, in the game he uses the inertia of the boulder to facilitate his escape from Hades. The game continues the theme as he uses the boulder to travel through time reducing notable figures to goo spots on the ground. If you don’t want to play as Sisyphus and his boulder, you are able to change the character and appearance of the boulder a number of alternates.
Article comments
1 - cindi
rock of ages ---mmmmm i fell asleep
2 - vbmax
what is it with tom --out of his depth