Oft misunderstood, the Vikings weren't always the seafaring, pillaging, warrior folk they're painted as in the history books - when they weren't knocking back the ale or ransacking the place, it turns out they could often be found soaring majestically through the skies after a glittering gem or three. Xbox Live Arcade title Rotastic lets you try your hand at this common Norse pastime, letting your muscle bound bearded bloke loop through the skies, nabbing jewels, smashing boxes and, er, attacking some chickens in the process.
The concept of Rotastic is pretty simple - suspended high above the clouds are a bunch of anchoring points that your surly warrior can attach himself to by way of a rope, letting him spin around in a circle, collecting the surrounding gems. But you won't get anywhere just pirouetting around the same point - once you release the A button, your Viking will career off at an angle (hopefully) towards one of the other points suspended in the sky. Like a giant airborne set of monkey bars, you need to swing from on point to the next like a viking Tarzan, collecting enough jewels to open up the exit to move on to the next level.
As well as collecting jewels, you also get points for performing tricks - like the 'Rotastic' figure of eight above.
Nabbing all the shiny things is all well and good, but you may not get the best score for the level from by just doing that, as you'll need to do it quickly too - and preferably without dying. Each level has four different ranks to achieve - rewarding you with a copper, silver, gold or diamond helmet depending on your score, but when the meat of your score comes from the time you have left, speed is of the essence.
It all starts off at a nice pedestrian pace, with the first world focused primarily on collecting gems in differing configurations. It introduces a few of the 'tricks' you can do, too, like the figure of eight between two adjacent anchor points, which bags you a few extra points for style, along with telling you how to swap the direction your warrior is spinning in (with LB or RB) - which seems simple enough, and is pretty addictive as you often find yourself replaying a level a couple of times to try and get a better helmet, or to beat one of your friend's scores on the leaderboards.
The second world gets a bit more complicated, and starts to introduce a load of obstacles to avoid like circular saws, battering rams and burning embers. Every so often, you get a slightly different level with a different goal, where you'll need to do something other than collect gems - whether it's swinging into a series of crates to shatter them, exploding some innocent chickens to steal the gems they carry, or surviving for a certain length of time.
One wrong move and you'll be roast pork...
While the first couple of sets of levels seem pretty straight forward, with the game introducing new concepts and hazards at a relatively slow pace, once you reach the third or forth the difficulty begins to ramp up considerably, to almost unfair levels in the final few worlds. But the average player probably won't reach the end, because Rotastic requires you to finish each levels with a silver helmet rating, on average - which mostly revolves around being speedy. Given the complexity of the later levels though, you'll be lucky to scrape a copper on most, making the latter levels out of the grasp of many.
Definitely worth a mention is Rotastic's multiplayer mode. It may be a simplistic nabbing jewels and beating up your friends affair, but some times uncomplicated is the best and means everyone stands a chance. The Collect mode is basically a race to collect as many shiny things as you can for maximum pointage, but you can also sabotage the other players by cutting the rope that holds them to an anchoring point - just make sure you're spinning faster than they are. Other modes include a point-scoring mode where you'll need to do some fancy tricks to get the most points, and a deathmatch mode where the whole objective is to send your mates plummeting to their doom below.
Along with Fraghar the Viking, you can also play as Gamman the boar, Legalos the elf or Death Himself.
Here at Everybody Plays, we're a bit divided over Rotastic - one of us can't get past world four, while the other thinks Rotastic is a funky little arcade game that's perhaps a bit on the expensive side. Perhaps Rotastic could have been more of an all-round crowd pleaser just with a little tweak to the difficulty level; even just by making it so that unlocking new levels only relies on getting a copper helmet on the levels before - which is awarded simply by finishing them, which on the later levels is a challenge in itself. That way, the less able could at least attempt most of the levels, while those who want the extra challenge could go for the higher helmet ranks if they so wished.
Rotastic isn't a bad game by any means - but it's difficulty could pose a problem for the less able, making it a bit hard to rate or recommend. It zig-zags between the awesomely addictive 'just-one-more-go' feeling to almost infuriatingly impossible in the space of a few levels, and it's unrealistic expectations for unlocking more levels will prove to be a roadblock at some point. If you like a challenge, Rotastic has it in spades but if you're the sort that runs a mile when the going gets tough, you may be better with a different game.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
