Rock of Ages is a tower defense game in which you also steer a giant boulder down a hill and smash it into somebody’s castle. ACE Team developed it, Atlus published it, and it arrived on Xbox 360 in August 2011, on PC that September, and on PlayStation 3 in 2012. It runs on Unreal Engine 3. Two castles face each other across a slope. One is yours. The other belongs to a jerk whose castle, the game’s own description insists, sucks.
Trailer, via Official ATLUS West.
A Boulder and a Castle Gate
That is the whole joke, and Rock of Ages commits to it. You build defenses up your side of the hill, then switch to offense and roll a stone ball at the enemy’s gate at the bottom. Break through, plant the boulder in the castle’s center, and the opponent is dead. The enemy is doing the same thing to you the entire time. There is always a giant boulder headed your way.
The building half is where the strategy lives. You place obstacles along the path — buildings, dynamite, windmills, animals — to slow or wreck whatever comes down at you. Money farms pay for the good stuff. Obstacles only go on green ground, and that ground goes dead once something sits on it, so every placement is a small argument with yourself about the future.
Magma, Armor, and the Recharge
When you attack, you take the boulder yourself. Points buy power-ups: armor, magma, things that make the rock hit harder or survive longer. Take enough damage and the upgrade is gone. Hit the gate, or break apart on the way down, and there is a short recharge before the next launch.
The rolling is not a physics toy bolted onto a strategy game. It is the strategy game’s other half, and it borrows the feel of Marble Madness and Super Monkey Ball — a ball with weight, a hill with a slope, and a line of your own traps to thread on the way to somebody else’s door.
Sisyphus, Bosses, and a Story Mode
Rock of Ages ships a story mode loosely built on the myth of Sisyphus, spread across stages and boss fights. It is a thin frame, but it gives the campaign a spine and a reason for the art to keep changing.
Because the art does keep changing. The game pulls its look and its music from different ages of history, which is the source of its title and most of its personality. The same boulder rolls through eras that do not belong together, and the game treats that as a feature.
War and Skee Boulder
Multiplayer comes in several modes, and two of them are worth naming.
- War — two players each try to break the other’s castle gate.
- Skee Boulder — players race down a lane hitting targets before landing in a skeeball-style board, aiming for the target with the largest score multiplier.
War is the game at its purest: the build phase and the roll phase, both aimed at a live opponent instead of a scripted one. Skee Boulder is the odd one out, a scoring detour that drops the castle-smashing for a lane of targets.
What the Hill Gets Right
The best thing Rock of Ages does is refuse to separate its two halves. Your defenses are not scenery; they are the course your opponent’s boulder has to survive, and your boulder is the test of theirs. That symmetry gives every placement a second meaning. A windmill is not just a windmill. It is a problem you are handing to another person.
The second thing it gets right is the recharge. The pause between boulders is short, but it is long enough to make you watch. You watch your rock break on a gate you almost cracked. You watch theirs come down the hill you built. Few games this silly understand timing this well.
Where the Stone Cracks
The campaign’s Sisyphus frame is loose, and loose is the kind word. It gestures at a myth and then gets out of the way. The art and music carry more of the game’s identity than the story does, and when a stage’s era does not land, there is not much underneath to hold it up.
Skee Boulder is a smaller problem of the same shape. It is a fine diversion, but it is not what the game is about, and it sits in the mode list like a party trick next to the main event. The multiplayer is at its best when both players are doing the actual thing: building, rolling, and hoping.
The Verdict on Rock of Ages
Rock of Ages is a rock-solid combination of rock-rolling action, deep strategy, and art and music from different ages of history. That is the pitch, and the game mostly delivers it. It is crush or be crushed, played out on a hill with two castles and one very large stone.
What holds it at 7.5 rather than higher is that its best idea — the two halves feeding each other — is also its only big idea, and the parts that stray from it (the myth, the skeeball) are thinner than the parts that serve it. What keeps it from sliding lower is that the core loop is genuinely good, and the power-ups, the dead green ground, and the short recharge all pull in the same direction.
Play it for the hill. Play it against a person if you can. Rock of Ages knows exactly what it is: a game about a boulder, a castle, and the other guy’s boulder, and it never pretends otherwise.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
