Rochard is a great crate shooter

There is an inevitable weird moment that comes up in gaming where you look dead ahead at the screen and just wonder. Games are constructs, stories if you want to be poetic, in which a bunch of dudes got together to assemble a narrative for you to push your way through. In most games, which are inevitably flawed, there's a moment where shit is just retarded. You question why, you wonder what the point is, your brain tries to figure how they came up with the idea to do this at all.

This moment comes up a bunch in Rochard. One might even say about half the game.

At it's core Rochard was sort of sold to me as a puzzle game with some shootie elements. It's a side scroller, with a vast array of tools slowly added to the game which on the most part base themselves around the usage of a gravity tool; either in lifting things with your "G-Lifter" or in lowering gravity which you can control.

Those elements are awesome. Hitting enemies - and there are enemies galore - in the face with crates actually never gets old. Hitting enemies in the fact with a crate which knocks them off a ledge then their corpse sails into another enemy killing them as well is pretty much a windmill slam of awesome. In fact, in an ironic twist given how much I hated the fucking "crate" in Dead Space, the crates are the best part of this game. I fucking love crates in Rochard. Just rename it CRATEZ. All the little puzzle quirks in Rochard are nice, the fuse system, recoil jumps, all the weird force fields - the game has tons of ideas for how to make crates fun.

Then again if you could pick up the crate in Dead Space and splatter zombies with it, the game would be actually twice as good as it was. I guess that would ruin the nonexistent atmosphere of the end of the game though!

Going back to the problems with Rochard - Well ok, I mean, at a basic level the game is an indie title with somewhat lacking voice acting outside of the main character, the controls are a little loose and the graphics may or may not appeal to you. I really like the art style, as it is clean and simple, with pretty solid conveyance of different elements at a glance. I think on an aesthetic level its objectively good, but subjective tastes may vary as they tend to. The plot is hokey and probably a little unnecessary given the overall context of the game but that's not something I like to get stuck on.

But the big issue is the game at times seems to really not want to be a puzzle game, and instead be a contra esque side scrolling shooter. With tubby, slow moving, goofball protagonist. I'm not entirely sure - hence the sense of wonderment - what they were thinking. Is it really hard to come up with fun physics puzzles when you have that many possible options? Almost all the puzzle bits are fun, and much of the game feels like it should just be puzzles as the hero sneaks his way through the underbelly of various facilities.

I know this might sound a little weird but I feel like the puzzle of "how do I get out of this room?" should have made more of an appearance. It's realistic that a tubby miner trying to sneak his way through an asteroid and the later levels would run into this problem, as opposed to armed guards finding their way into and throughout the duct work. What are they doing there? The game suffers tremendously from having an incredibly interesting set of, while not necessarily "unique" puzzling elements, at least cheerfully presented ones that it largely seems to have no interest in using. Instead it constantly throws a pair of puzzles at you I have little enjoyment of: How Do I Shoot These Guys With This Terrible Aiming System and Some Shit With Lasers

The Laser puzzles are obnoxious and artificially lengthen the game by lasering you to death repeatedly. Which then triggers a relatively slow reload (seriously, this game loads slower than dead space) and you repeat the puzzle. This isn't good game design by any stretch of the imagination, given I don't think that silly cute puzzles involving gravity and crates are all that hard to put in the game instead. I sort of gave them a pass in the early game, where it made sense for there to be lasers and other hazards - You're on a mining platform, in deep space, on an asteroid. Of course there's going to be demolition equipment! But in the later game, you're not on a mining platform, so why the fuck are there lasers. Lasers, I might add, which kill the enemies. So they're not exactly a 'security system' are they?

The enemies though are the real stinker of the game and perhaps speak extremely poorly of the game's development team. While I'm loathe to call someone else's hard work poor when I'm writing poorly crafted sentences on a blog, I'm at a loss to explain why the enemies are even in the game in such numbers to begin with, especially in light of their inept coding.

Enemy AI is a delicate balance: An AI that is "too good" frustrates players. An AI that is utterly incapable and toothless is also irritating, as it is more or less a waste of time. The Enemies in Rochard are both. They are perfect, crack shots, nailing a moving target behind cover with near perfect accuracy. If they can hit you, they will. In fact, once activated, enemies will fire on you from off screen, plastering you over and over as you flee to break line of sight. Cover has little impact on their ability to kill you, as their shots are completely steady and relentless.

But enemies are also rubbish, easily tricked and exceedingly dopey. The only reason they're a threat at all is simply a matter of their accuracy being perfect, while your ability to hit a moving target can be less than perfect. You are then thrust into battling them in mostly linear hallways, where they fire on you from a screen over. With little recourse, you often simply end up gunned down.

It's baffling. Not only are they entirely needless within the relative framework of what makes the game good, you are even denied the means by which to deal with them in a fun way. Dropping crates on enemies or smacking them with exploding turret debris is "fun". Shooting the enemies is irritating - the aiming system is clumsy, possibly as a mix of both needs the game puts on it. The puzzle elements, I think, suffer for this as well. The game is thankfully less than excited to give you stacking puzzles, since stacking crates is actually pretty tedious.

I think at it's core Rochard was a really great game, but then needed to be lengthened out and they settled on something a little less than optimal. The puzzles, though usually simple, have this earnest hands on feeling that makes them surprisingly satisfying. Had the game been 75% puzzles, 25% run and gun instead of 50:50 I think I'd be giving it high praise. As is, it's about half a great game, half an exercise in mediocrity and I'm not at all certain why.

Worth getting if you can put up with there being less puzzle in your puzzle game, not so much if you get to the first run and gun section and slam the keyboard down in rage.

As an aside and sort of a foot note - I could do without the odd racism mixed with the extremely strange selection of accents on the sky police.