Rolling Sun is a pretty game.
A pretty bad one.
This game might as well be an advertisement for the Cryengine’s resources; this gameRolling Sun is a pretty game.
A pretty bad one.
This game might as well be an advertisement for the Cryengine’s resources; this game makes use of the Cryengine’s built-in resources to build a very pretty game. There’s beautiful landscapes, nice vistas, breathtaking rivers…
And very little fun to be had, sadly.
The game itself is a basic platformer. You control a spherical rock (possibly one of the stone spheres of Costa Rica, though it has ornate, glowing designs over the surface), and this matters – your rock will roll off of inclined slopes and has a fair bit of weight to it, which can tax some of the floating platforms. You start off having only the ability to roll around and jump, but over the course of the game you acquire the ability to double jump, air dash, and float (a much slower rate of descent) at the end of the second, third, and fourth levels respectively. While this sounds like it would add more gameplay, it honestly doesn’t; double jumping is the only ability that actually ends up important, and while you can use the other abilities, they’re never really necessary.
The game consists of six fairly short levels with checkpoints distributed throughout them. The checkpoints are invisible but are mostly fairly generous, with the exception of the end of the final level, where it feels like half the level feeds off of one checkpoint. Not that it really matters in terms of difficulty; there’s only a few sections (such as one bit where there’s a moving platform underneath you that moves forward, reassembling itself before you – with or without you, if you’re too slow) that are really challenging platforming.
Instead, the game has the lovely aspect of being “3D”, but being more like those old beat-’em-up games where you can move across a narrow space, but are mostly just moving left to right. However, if you move outside of these bounds, sometimes you’ll run into an invisible wall (okay), and sometimes you’ll get picked up by a floating Mayan mask which drags you back to the last checkpoint as if you fell off the level. This discourages you from poking around and exploring… not that there’s anything to explore, really.
It takes until the third level of the game for it to do anything different, at which point it starts having sections that lead away from the camera into the distance (and, at a few painful points, head towards the camera, which thanks to the narrow field of view makes it hard to see where you’re going).
Each level is filled with collectables – namely, a small floating rock with a blue field around it. They’re basically the game’s equivalent of coins, and they’re all over the place and mostly are used to show the proper way forward. If you collect every one of them in every level, you’ll unlock four bonus stages, which are shorter than the main levels and contain no checkpoints and the most challenging platforming in the game (though they’re still not all that hard).
The further the game goes on, the weaker it gets; the first few levels feel fairly organic, but by the end of the game it often feels fairly arbitrary in terms of the level design, and the graphical quality also declines in the second half of the game, with pop-in issues rearing their head in the fourth level, followed by a rather drab nighttime level and a final snow level which is very generic and doesn’t even let your ball make paths in the snow in its wake.
All in all, the game is just not worth it. It is about an hour and a half long if you want to get and play all the content, but there’s really just not much here; very basic platforming with mediocre at best level design consisting of platforms, bridges, and similar things over bottomless pits. There aren’t any enemies to speak of, no story… it is just a rather empty experience.
Pretty, but pretty pointless to play.… Expand
