Will Rock

Will Rock is a game developed by Saber Interactive and published by Ubisoft. Saber Interactive is known for having developed Timeshift(released in 2007) and in 2010 they will release Inversion. Ubisoft is known for quite a lot of games and series, such as the Rayman series, Assassin's Creed, Brothers in Arms and many more. Will Rock was released in june 2003.

In Will Rock you're playing as Willford Rockwell. Willford is a young archaeologists who heads down to Mount Olympus in order to investigate a possible entrance of a temple, but as soon as he starts examining the entrance things go bad, the Olympian Restoration Army kidnaps your girlfriend and performs a ritual which opens the gate, through which they flee, but during a gunfight one of the statues is hit, and Prometheus arises from the statue striking down on the remaining ORA members. Then he turns to you and asks you to combine your power so that you do him a favor and kill Zeus and his minions and you'll get your girlfriend back. And at the end this will be exact what's going to happen, so there are no plot-twists in this game, it's more of an intro and and outro really.

Will Rock is an old-school first person shooter, you walk around, picking up weapons and items and shoot enemies, lots of enemies. Because in Will Rock you'll have to kill hundreds of enemies per section of a level. Luckily they are all quite easy to kill, it's just the sheer amount of them that are giving you a hard time sometimes, although I have to admit that the game is fairly easy. There are some differences between a normal shooter and Will Rock, primarily it's the fact that you can get powerups throughout the game. There are three powerups you can get Titan Damage, Titan Motion and Invulnerability. Titan Damage increases the damage you do for 30 seconds, Titan Motion gives you slow-motion for 30 seconds and Invulnerability makes you invincible for 30 seconds. The gameplay and controls feel very smooth and give you absolute control over your character, which is something I like in videogames, because it can help you a lot in certain situations, but more on that in the section about leveldesign. The weapons you can use in this game are a shovel, a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun, a minigun, an acid gun, a medusa gun, an atomic gun(which can be missed), fireball thrower and a crossbow.

The graphics are okay for a game from 2003, they aren't the best from that year but they suffice and the smoothness of the gameplay more than makes up for it. The giant environment is a sight for sore eyes, the gigantic temples and arena's have an epic feel to them, especially during the boss fights, especially the last one where you confront Zeus himself. The enemies you face are pretty standard but their design has been done fairly well, not that it really sticks out, after all the pace at which you're blazing through enemies won't give you much time to sight-see.

The leveldesign is also great, as I've mentioned before the temples, giant arenas and other places you'll visit during your adventure are done very well and have an epic feeling to them. The areas are mixed up, you have levels with water, lava and rooms filled with traps, so you never know what you're going to expect. In Will Rock you'll have certain areas in which you have to do some platforming, but rarely you'll have to make a pixel-perfect jump, the game seems to be quite forgiving when it comes to platforming. However, you can skip certain parts if you do have pixel-perfect skills, sometimes it's a secret, but there are also times at which the developer simply didn't expect anyone to be able to make a certain jump. For example, within the game I was in a temple in which you had four different ways of getting to the top level and all four ways were supposed to be enclosed, because the developers had put in a round fence in order to keep players from simply using the edge below to skip having to use a different route, but what I found out is that if you manage to land on the fence, you can use it to hop past that area.

There are about ten levels in this game, and they're divided into three missions, every mission contains three levels and those missions end in a boss fight and the last level is the fight against Zeus. The boss-fights vary in difficulty, the first one(a giant cyclops) is a push-over, the second one(a giant guy with an eye-patch and a wooden leg) I found to be extremely difficult, since it took me multiple attempts to kill him. But the third boss(a flying bird woman thing) was very easy, especially with the acid gun. The final boss(Zeus) starts out as being quite difficult but when you've discovered his pattern you can simply pick a spot where he can't hit you and where you can hit him and kill him softly but steadily.

The sound and music in this game is exceptionally well, it starts out as We Will Rock You as the menu song, and throughout the game there are various rock remixes on other songs. Now if you don't care too much about rock music, you can turn it off in the menu and simply play your own music in the background like I did. The sounds of the guns are okay, they sound the way they should sound, they might not be a 100% correct but this game doesn't try to be realistic so this can be forgiven, the enemies and other sounds sound the way they should sound. Every once in a while your main character will say some line that's supposed to make you laugh, but more often than not they aren't funny.

So, to conclude this review, I would definitely recommend this game if you really like old-school first-person shooters. If you don't really care too much about shooters I'd suggest you give it a rent or something seeing as some may think the game is quite boring, because of the thousands of enemies you plough through in order to get to the end, however the final boss is definitely worth all the time, not really the ending itself (it's a cheap slideshow basically telling you that all is good now). So yeah, check this game out, it should be quite cheap now, seeing as it was released in 2003.