Chances are you’ve seen a hero swinging across the sky in some way or another; Spider-Man using his webs to zip from building to building, or perhaps Indiana Jones or some of the Belmonts from Castlevania with their whips. It’s unrealistic, but it’s a flashy and fun way for these characters to go from place to place. Rotastic takes that idea and asks: "What would it be like to make a puzzle game out of said swinging?" If that sounds like fun to you, rest assured that the developers made good on the premise and hit all the important points; you have good controls, plenty of content, and a variety of tasks even if they often revolve around the same end goal. Though you do need decent reflexes, Rotastic is otherwise accessible to almost anyone.
Played from a 2D perspective, Rotastic gives you control of a small cartoon-like character armed with a rope and dropped into a ’sky field’ populated by obstacles, gems, and small round swing points for the rope to grab. While some stages add special objectives such as hitting switches or dodging incoming attacks for a certain length of time, most levels just require you to perform a few swinging tricks while grabbing all the jewels in the sky and making your way to the exit. This is very easy to do at first, as a single button press will cause your character to automatically rope-grab the nearest swing point and begin twirling around it. Repeating the process at the right time will send him flying again, hopefully toward the items you’re trying to collect. The only other controls are holding onto a swing point to eventually develop a single-use ’forcefield’ to protect your character from obstacles, and reversing your rotation; both are simple to do and Rotastic is a very easy game to learn.
Depth thus comes from mastering the swing mechanic and understanding how to use your forcefield to survive dangerous situations. The forcefield is mostly a matter of timing since it takes a few seconds to prepare, but is otherwise obvious. The real fun comes from swinging physics, as you’re fully encouraged to do tricks with the rope. Simply swinging around to grab the gems is fine, but swinging around in figure-eight patterns and other specific, artistic stunts will award bonus points that unlock new stages far more quickly. Though you start with an open field, Rotastic regularly adds new gimmicks such as walls to bounce off of, special objectives such as smashing into blocks to break them (like Arkanoid or Breakout, except you are the ball), hitting a series of switches, precisely landing so you stick to the adhesive part of a moving wall to reach an otherwise impossible destination, and so on. This makes it a great game to play in short bursts, completing a few stages at a time and coming back to see something familiar but still different enough to be interesting.
It should be noted that while Rotastic’s art style might seem akin to comics like Hagar the Horrible, it actually has more in common with games like Super Meat Boy or Castle Crashers. This won’t be a problem for the vast majority of players, but those with particularly young children might be concerned that certain obstacles will cause the player’s character to ’explode’ into a low-detail mess of blood and bone. It’s very casual and cartoon-like so I doubt many people would be shocked by it, but it seems worth covering nevertheless. However, this simple yet exaggerated style actually works in the game’s favor as some later levels will have many things happening in sequence. More complex graphics could make it hard to follow, so this simple style ensures the action in Rotastic is almost always easy to understand and that most mistakes in play are one’s own fault.
