For more on Rotastic, check out our full Rotastic review. Or, for more of the best Xbox 360 games for a 10 year old, why not try our Family Game Finder
Rotastic is a game about an airborne Viking with a taste for jewels. Suspended up in the clouds are a load of anchoring points, which your warrior can grapple onto, swinging round and round before flinging himself to the next - accumulating gems as he flies. As the game goes on, the levels get more complex and add in obstacles like circular saws, battering rams or burning embers that you'll need to avoid on your way to the end of the level too.
Simple enough in concept and with minimal reading involved, most children could get a handle on what you have to do in Rotastic - but whether they could actually get very far is another matter. Not only do you have to be able to work out trajectories and stuff, but the difficulties of some of the levels, particularly the later ones, would likely put them off. Add in that the requirements for unlocking new levels are a bit on the steep side, and we're not convinced younger children will be that enthused.
Rotastic does verge on the unnecessarily gory side for what it is - why the deaths of your Viking result in a shower of body parts and blood, or the chickens explode in similar ways when you soar into them, we don't understand. No one is going to play your puzzley-type game because you add gore; it's the type of game which would probably never even be on the radar for the majority of Gears of War fans. It's like adding a gratuitous headshot every time you clear four lines at once on Tetris - pointless, and the only thing it could possibly do it put people off who would have otherwise enjoyed the game.
While Rotastic is mainly a single-player game, it does have the option for four player local multiplayer games. There's a Collect mode, where the object of the game is to collect more gems than your opponents, a stunt-performing point-scoring mode and a deathmatch game, where the whole objective is to slice through your friends' ropes and send them plummeting to their doom.
Age Ratings
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
