Game Deconstruction and Analisys – Rochard

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.