Is Katamari Damacy an evil game? I realised as soon as I wrote the heading for this one that calling one game an evil version of Katamari might not be quite right, given the level of destruction you can enact in that series. Perhaps we’re getting into an ontological argument there, so I’m going to move past it and properly introduce you to ROLLA, a game where you play as a mobile mass of flesh that seeks to wreak havoc upon the world by rolling around and destroying everything.
ROLLA differs from Katamari in a number of ways. They both have pseudo arcade origins; ROLLA has various challenges per level that you can accomplish, like destroying a certain amount of radio towers, killing a set number of humans, or wracking up millions worth of property damage. This isn’t unlike Katamari, it’s just a lot more explicitly violent, and the violence is reciprocal.
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As you roll around destroying various cities across the game’s levels, your mass of flesh increases in size bit by bit. In the demo that I played, it could seemingly only get to a certain size, but then again I didn’t manage to demolish the entire city. Like in Katamari, you can get smaller too, only instead of bits accidentally falling off from ramming into things the wrong way, police and the military will get involved, shooting and firing rockets at you, amongst other things, to reduce you into nothingness. And so it’s down to your mass of fleshing rolling skills to stay alive as long as possible.
You can pick up bonuses along the way, like shields that repel or soak up bullets, and lightning shooting out of you, all of which are temporary. I do wish there was a tad more variety in those abilities, not in a roguelikey, endlessly replayable kind of way, just so that runs of levels can stay fresh. I do also wonder if ROLLA could have taken the Katamari route of using an alternate control scheme to make the rolling itself a lot more tactile, but I can also imagine that causing some unsatisfying friction with the rest of how the game is designed. Will have to spend more time with it in the full thing to get a better idea, but still, I’m charmed by it and its B-movie vibes.
You can wishlist, and try out the demo, on Steam right here ahead of its release on September 30th.