Is Katamari Damacy an evil game? I realized as soon as I wrote the title for this one that calling a game an evil version of Katamari might not be entirely fair, given the level of destruction you can cause in this series. Perhaps we’re getting into an ontological debate here, so I’ll move past that and properly introduce you to ROLLA, a game in which you play as a moving mass of flesh that seeks to wreak havoc on the world by rolling around and destroying everything.
ROLLA differs from Katamari in several ways. They both have pseudo-arcade origins; ROLLA offers different challenges per level that you can complete, such as destroying a certain number of radio towers, killing a set number of humans or causing millions of property damage. It’s not unlike Katamari, it’s just much more explicitly violent and the violence is mutual.
As you destroy different cities throughout the game’s levels, your flesh mass increases little by little. In the demo I played, it apparently could only grow to a certain size, but again I wasn’t able to demolish the entire city. Like in Katamari, you can also become smaller, but instead of pieces accidentally falling by going the wrong way, the police and military will get involved, pulling you and firing rockets, among other things, to reduce you to nothing. So it’s up to your mass of flesh-rolling skills to stay alive as long as possible.
You can pick up power-ups along the way, like shields that repel or absorb bullets, and lightning bolts that shoot at you, all of which are temporary. I wish there was a little more variety in these abilities, not in a roguelike, endlessly replayable way, just so the level sets could stay fresh. I also wonder if ROLLA could have gone the Katamari route of using an alternative control scheme to make the rolling itself much more tactile, but I can also imagine that causing some unsatisfying friction with the rest of the game’s design. You’ll have to spend more time on it in its entirety to get a better feel for it, but still, I’m charmed by it and its B-movie vibe.
You can add a wishlist and try the demo on Steam, right here before its release on September 30.
