Rochard is a puzzle platformer that heavily relies on gravity to solve
the puzzles. John Rochard is a space miner that got in to trouble after finding
a large chunk of space ore that ended his bad streak.
In order to save his friend Skylar and prevent Maximilian to acquire an
overwhelming power, John Rochard must save the day.
Mechanics
The core mechanic in Rochard is gravity manipulated mainly through the
G-Lifter.
The gravity also can be lowered in the room that you are, and inverted
as well. Other game changing mechanic is the color-coded force fields.
The G-Lifter
The most important gameplay item in this title, the G-Lifter is upgraded
at each chapter of the game to increase gameplay.
You start the game with the regular G-Lifter that can only lift crates
and other small objects. Then you upgrade it with the Rock Blaster to shoot
laser at the enemies. After that, you get the recoil jump. To do this, you jump
and then shoot a crate downward with the G-lifter while low gravity is enabled,
which propels you upward. That is almost the same as a double jump but way
cooler. You also get explosives as an upgrade and they will help you a lot on
combat. You can use the G-Lifter as a grappling hook when you pick up the
upgrade that allow you to swing in lower gravity.
With this many types of upgrades, the player think that he will be able
to solve encounters any way he wants. However, sometimes, you will have to rely
on shooting the bad guys, throwing explosives at them. Because there are going
to be too many of them for you to try to deliver a crate or other objects over
their heads.
Crates,
Turrets, Droids and everything else the G-Lifter can lift or grapple
Crates can be used as
platforms, can be shoot on to a baddie, as shields that redirect laser then
grappled by the G-Lifter, to launch you higher on lower gravity on a recoil
jump. In addition, as an anchor to
reach the more difficult areas in lower gravity.
Turrets and droids
shoot at you and kill you. However, after a upgrade, they can be used as
explosives when you grab and throw them away. It can be tricky but you can use
them even for a recoil jump.
Manipulate
Gravity
John Rochard also has the ability to change gravity on the room that he
is. By doing that, he can jump higher and farther. Lift objects that normally
he cannot and pull himself up by grappling on special crates.
Gravity also can be reversed to solve some puzzles. By doing it so,
Rochard can walk on the ceiling and everything that is on the room is affected
as well. Crates, enemies will change place and will help or get in his way.
Color
Coded Energy Fields
Sometimes in a room, you will find an energy field. In addition, depending
on its colour, it will behave in a different way by determining what can go
through. The blue ones only allow life forms to go through. The red ones only
allow mechanical things. The orange ones block explosions, fire and lasers.
Finally, the white energy field blocks everything.
So it will be required a lot of thinking to deal with them sometimes.
Level Design
One other thing that
made me enjoy Rochard was the level design. The five chapters take place on
space stations, mostly on space mines, but even with the huge potential to
reuse the same environments, which Recoil haven’t done, each chapter has its
own personality. By using different themes and colour palettes, the level
designers manage to create unique and pleasant areas. As you went through each chapter,
you are able to feel the difference and if you take your time, you will manage
to observe that he levels are not dull or plain.
Conclusion
Rochard is a well-made side-scroller game. Paced on space mines, it
excels on the level design where you find well-designed puzzles, which are
solved through the use of the G-Lifter and non-reusable levels, extra points
for them. The soundtrack is also amazing specially the intro music and the voice
acting. The voice of John Rochard was done by Jon St. John, who is mainly known
on the gamming community for doing the voice of Duke Nukem. The plot is a
little cheesy but is fine if you are a sci-fi fan. Unfortunately, it fails when
you have to deal with heavy combat because the commands are sometimes clunky. In
fact sometimes I felt that the designers threw the combat in there because they
couldn’t figure out a better puzzle. Overall, it is good game and for £7.00 is
really worth it.
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