I throw around the word "polish" a lot in these reviews, and I never really bothered to explain what I meant. There are many ways that word can be interpreted, so let me take this moment to expand upon what I mean a bit.
Polish is NOT having the latest and greatest and prettiest graphics, nor is it the elimination of boxy design elements or choppy animations, nor is it the quality of the sound effects or fluidity of the controls...okay, well maybe a bit of the last two, but my point is that in all the aforementioned areas, Rock-It Rails excels beautifully, but I still wouldn't call the game "polished"
What I really mean when I say polish is "the absence of silly mistakes." You know the kind. There are contradictory design elements where two people on the dev team clearly weren't communicating, but then there are design flaws that seem to have simply flown right over everyone's heads. Rock-It Rails has none of the former, but is filled with the latter.
The most noticeable yet least frequent flaw I ran into was that sometimes you can just phase right through a section of floor and get caught in a sort of underground limbo from which there is no escape. This may not seem like a big deal until you take into consideration the next problem:
There's a big fat unskippable narration type thing that explains the controls before you start the first level. And you have to listen to it every time you lose all 3 lives. 3 lives may seem like a lot, but then you realize:
the game is filled with cheap death areas. For instance, the levels are designed in such a way that I felt comfortable taking a leap of faith...and it worked! Then I tried it again in an area that looked exactly the same, and it didn't. So yeah. Your deaths are only going to be your fault like 1/3 of the time anyway, so those 3 lives don't exactly go a long way.
Alright, I've griped enough. Let me talk about the stuff I liked.
Well, the character design is well done. The little fake engine revving noise the main character makes when she grinds along rails is downright adorable and the professor man's voice seems like it was done by a professional. Everything is drawn in such a charming manner that were the game not filled with the aforementioned annoyances, I would totally have enough motivation to keep playing from the visual design alone.
Also, I like the game's premise and level design a lot. Essentially, you interact with rails, which are strewn all over the levels, in 3 different ways, by phasing through them, by bouncing off them, and by grinding along them. You swap through the modes with the mouse buttons. The first level (the only one I played before I quit) is designed fairly well minus all the cheap deaths. It's big and expansive to promote exploration and the rails are prevalent and fun to use enough that you'll have no problem backtracking and scouring every inch of the level.
So yeah, we have another episode of "great premise, bad execution." Perhaps now you'll understand a bit better what I mean when I say this game lacks polish, though it certainly won't seem that way when you first boot it up.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay scientific.
Links
vroom vroom yay: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26702
