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Game, Played
I found that there were certain concessions I had to make in order to get to grips with RooGoo. Namely, I had to put on sunglasses and ear mufflers to block out the assault of twinkly sound effects and bright, colourful lights.With that done though, the game actually turned out to be exactly the opposite of what we expected. What looks like an uninteresting and bland game for children turned out to be a reflex puzzle game suitable for only the most hardcore of gamers.
At the top level, RooGoo would best be described as a cross between Tetris and the Early Learning Centre, but with the heart of a seething Daily Mail reader at the peak of a diatribe. To say that though is to do it an injustice though as it’s clear that displaying any real skill at RooGoo is a mighty fear – and we wouldn’t dare disrespect anyone who can claim mastery of this fiendish game.
Though the basic idea behind RooGoo is simply that the player rotates blocks one at a time to let Meteors of Joy fall through, there’s naturally a bunch of things designed to complicate that aim as you push on.
There are butterflies that’ll grab your meteors and pull them up, there are stars to get that will multiply the falling meteors and there are these evil little MeeMoo basts that sit there until you squash them with speeding Meteors of Joy – Whammy!
Then, as things progress through the impressive number of levels (even the early ones that are pretty darn difficult), more problems come into play and you’ll have to re-order your stacks of meteors to make sure those of the same colour are aligned. Fast fingers and an ability to multitask are definitely required.
There’s also a multiplayer mode on offer in RooGoo that lets two players go head to head on the same keyboard provided the one who suggests it doesn’t die of awkward shame before convincing a cohort to join up.
Overall though the game doesn’t vary much though from it’s primary game design, which is a shame since it would have been nice to break up the Falling-Meteor stuff with an extra game mode or something. Behind The Scenes video vignettes would probably be pushing it, but an extra game mode or something would have been nice, even if it’s little more than a Survival Mode or something.
One thing that does confuse us about RooGoo though is where the developer sees it sliding into the market. The game may look like a kids puzzle and it may first appear to be the type of thing which will entertain you for little more than a few minutes, if at all, but that’s barely scratching the surface.
The problem is that once the veneer has been stripped away RooGoo is a monstrously difficult game to beat and though the actual idea is easy to pick up, playing every level of the singleplayer campaign is a challenge of the most masochistic variety.
Conclusions
Just because the game is tough though, isn’t to say that RooGoo isn’t fun. It is fun to play, kind of. Fun in the same kind of way as Peggle or Drug Wars or any other casual game. You don’t actually massively enjoy playing the game, you just crave the sense of accomplishment and completion and you get sucked into this trap early on thanks to the pick-up-and-play design. There are only two real things that prevent RooGoo from being a good game and neither of these are really going to be a huge problem to any initiated puzzle fans. The first is that there really isn’t much to be had beyond the single game mode and once you’ve played one level you’ve played them all.
The other problem is the way the game presents itself. We’ve joked about the bright colours, MeeMoos, King Goos, and Roos of RooGoo, but the reality is that they really are a problem. RooGoo is too fast and frantic to be a kids game, so we have to judge it as more than that and while the game would still have problems if it was presented as a less immature puzzler, it would be a bit better off.
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