by Omar (@siegarettes)

• Rock of Ages 2
  
• Developer- ACE Team
  
• Publisher- ATLUS
  
• PC, PS4
  

The original Rock of Ages was one of the first games I ever reviewed. I wasn’t kind to it. I was enamored with its tour of art history by way of competitive tower defense, but the actual act of playing it ended as a competition in seeing who could roll their boulder down a hill faster. Its humor never landed with me either. Still, I can’t deny that Rock of Ages was a spectacle. ACE Team is a developer that’s kept me engaged through the sheer wonder of their art direction. So the promise of a new, more varied living art gallery built by a more experience team was all I needed to show up for Rock of Ages 2.

Within the opening minutes I had already been surprised. I’d expected a step up in terms of art, but what I didn’t expect was Rock of Ages 2 to have me laugh aloud almost immediately. The first game had a few chuckle worthy gags, mixed in with plenty of jokes that didn’t land well despite, or maybe because of, ACE Team’s clear imitation of the Monty Python animation style. This time ACE Team has opted for a faster, punchier delivery, which helps both when jokes land and when they falter. There’s a fantastic opening joke involving a strategy classroom and Napoleon, and better yet they follow it up with a basic tutorial taught by him, entirely in French. Even if it made the tutorial a bit harder to take in, it was a good follow through that committed to the bit that I could only laugh at.

It’s a bit that works thanks in part to its use of a recognizable figure, and that’s an approach that works well elsewhere. Rock of Ages 2 opts for a more pop culture approach this time, with a larger range of art movements and more frequent use of specific popular art pieces. This is bolstered by a cast of historical and mythological figures that are easy to recognize and draw character archetypes from immediately. While the pretentious art major in me is tempted to sneer at the obvious populist appeal of it, there is absolutely no denying the draw of pitting Hercules and The Scream against each other as you roll boulders and through the surrealist landscape of a Dali painting.

This time also involved more than just rolling boulders. The first game often felt like it was possible to win simply by rolling down the hill faster than the opponent. In Rock of Ages 2 there’s still a big emphasis on dexterous maneuvering, but thanks to a larger set of tools and better course design, there’s many more viable strategies for slowing down or outright destroying the opponent’s boulder. I learned this firsthand both in the campaign and online, where clever combinations of traps sent me off the stage an infuriating number of times.

There’s an absurd number of tactical cattle–herds of cows that attached to my boulder forced me to roll like a lopsided Katamari, armored bulls shoved me into traps and catapults, and even larger bulls that stomped me into the earth while I helplessly waited to be shoved around. These can be combined with artillery and explosives to deny areas very effectively.

In general there’s many more RTS style hooks. You can trade a tower slot for gold mines that help fund more towers, destroyed towers leave their spots of the grid unusable unless regenerated, and new boulders can deny opponents space to build. At every point there’s trade offs to be made, and I always felt forced to adapt rather than finding a single optimal combination. The new multiplayer options add some layers, giving a choice between whether to add to the firepower or focus on building supporting units. Multiple boulders can even be chose to change them up as the situations calls.

There are so many options, in fact, that it often feels disadvantaging not to have particular units. Explosives in particular can do serious damage and make navigating difficult, so it felt tough without them. New units can be earned through both the campaign or multiplayer, so it isn’t a huge obstacle, but it did mean that for a while matches felt like something I needed to grind out rather than enjoy for their sake.

And even past that there was a learning curve to learning how to properly use all the options, or what effective combinations even look like. There’s no real guide on how to use a unit, so learning them often involves a lot of trial and error, and trying to imitate what opponents use to shut you down. Knowing the layout and chokepoints of a particular map also play a huge part, which meant losing a lot of games and working out how to approach a map through trial and error.

Learning becomes something done through rote repetition. This is a problem with a lot of competitive games, and it seems Rock of Ages 2’s focus on competition has brought those problems along. This is felt most in the story mode, which is otherwise lighthearted and freely structured, but suffers from having to repeat stages until they’re learned. It never became too frustrating since matches are relatively short, but it kept me from engaging with it for long periods.

Short and sweet sessions felt like the best way to engage with Rock of Ages 2 as a whole. It never felt like something I was compelling to spend long spells with. Instead it was something that I enjoyed checking in on, seeing the next gag, taking in the art of the next stage, or playing a few online matches. ACE Team’s trademark charm and art direction are always enough for me to show up for their games, but this time around I was pleasantly surprised at how much they’d improved from their first attempt. Rock of Ages 2 is, if not a brilliant game, something that fulfills the promise of the first one.