Rolla Review – High Score Horror Hijinks

How do I describe Rolla? My first instinct is to say it’s “Katamari Damacy meets Carrion”, but that’s not quite accurate. You are a flesh monster that eats people and the countryside to get bigger, but the game doesn’t have the zen vibes of Katamari or the stealth puzzle mechanics of Carrion. Instead what it has is frenetic, arcade action, level challenges like a twisted Tony Hawk title, and high scores.

The story, such as it is, is deliberately very thin. You are an extraterrestrial organism that has just escaped from your secure container into a populated area, and now it’s time to feed. On people, trees, cars, random buildings, the existing infrastructure, and even the police and military trying to destroy you. Your goal is simple; to survive for as long as possible, wreak as much havoc and destruction as you can, and rack up the highest score possible before you’re inevitably destroyed by gunfire, artillery, missiles, or eventually an atomic bomb.

The controls are deceptively simple, being they are just moving, either by keyboard or joystick, a button to dash, and a button to grab people with. I say “deceptively simple” because, while rolling around to destroy and absorb buildings in a level, dashing to avoid attacks, and grabbing people are most of what you will be doing in each level, you are also going to be under attack for practically every moment of every level. This means you will need to constantly dash and grab to absorb people to heal from damage to grow bigger and avoid shrinking small enough to die, all while trying to complete each level’s objectives and also aiming for higher and higher scores.

Level objective? Yes, in addition to the general goal of getting a high score, each level has a set of objectives to try and complete. A first set to start, and then a second set once the first few are completed. Some of these, like collecting the letters to Rolla and lasting until THE END are the same for each level, others are generic like dealing a certain dollar value of damage, eating a number of humans or destroying a percentage of the buildings in the level, while others like consuming all the gravestones in a cemetery (and elsewhere) are unique to a given level. There are two reasons to complete these goals. One is to unlock later levels, as each level beyond the first requires more and more completed goals to unlock. The other is to unlock the second set of goals for a stage and its more hectic, higher scoring form.

As you control the freshly escaped creature – rolling around, grabbing or crushing humans, vehicles and buildings – the dollar amount of damages and loss of life pops up around you, and your total, the actual score, is tracked in a HUD that looks like a broadcast ticker for the live broadcast you are watching in the game’s Kayfabe as is the amount of time your current level has been running. As you roll around the level, the human response to your rampage begins. At first it’s just cops with guns, but soon it’s swat teams, flamethrower troops, tanks, and strafing runs by planes etc. While you’re constantly gaining size thanks to your destruction, you’re also steadily losing it thanks to the bullets flying around. It’s very easy to be a massive ball of destruction one second, and a barely surviving sack the next.

Rolla does somewhat incentivize gaining and losing size by awarding a comeback bonus for barely escaping a game over and growing back up, but while it can be very difficult to gain and keep size, there are some options. The game occasionally spawns in power ups, like the bullet eater, which lets you gain instead of lose size for taking damage, the bullet reflector, which makes you invincible, and auto grab, which autograbs every human in range. These can be very powerful, but they spawn in at random times and in random locations, and oftentimes well after the military response has ramped up to almost absurd levels.

While you never lose track of yourself thanks to the camera centering and auto zooming based on your size, this can also make it very hard to keep a clear eye on where damage is most likely to come from as the field of view shrinks as you do. Even adjusting the graphics to maximum sharpness instead of the default 90s-style jagged textures doesn’t always help. But the biggest issue I encountered was the exponential jump in human aggression, even on the early levels, which makes completing all the tasks quite the chore as it’s very easy to die on part nine of 10 of a task, especially when that task is “destroy a bunch of a thing that can hurt you.” A slight tweak to the aggression escalation might help, as would giving the Rolla the ability to store power ups, rather than forcing them to activate as soon as they’re collected.

Rolla is a lot of fun. It is built for arcade-y pick up and playing in short spurts, even if you “just one more try” several times in a row. There aren’t many levels. Nine total, and while the idea is to get a high score for the leaderboard, I hope there will be more levels added down the line. For Tyrmä Games’ first outing, Rolla shows a lot of promise. Their monster just might have escaped a little early, is all.

Tim reviewed Rolla on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game that was available at the time of writing, and our score will not be changed.