Rocky Road Review

Rocky Road may be the name of a popular sweet food, but this game could not have less to do with confectionary; especially when you consider that this is a puzzle game, and one that focuses on the notion of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Similar to the actual game of Rock, Paper, Scissors - rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, and scissors beats paper. Knowing this will enable you to play this puzzle game, as it requires you to swipe what beats what, until only one may remain. If you’re stuck with two icons that are the same, then you’re going to need to reset the level by double tapping on the screen.

The game does give you a tutorial for you to look over, which gives you a very brief notion on how to play the game for yourself. However, what the game fails to teach you is that if you ever get stuck, to reset the puzzle you have to double tap the screen. Whilst I was playing, this wasn’t self-explanatory, and required some trial and error before it was discovered. It would have taken almost no time at all to explain to the player how to use this key feature, but left it to the wayside.

Visually, Rocky Road does take a more simplified approach, with the backgrounds simply being one solid colour. The simplified design for rock, paper, and scissors all look nice and minimalistic, which keeps to the whole style that the game is going for.

One element that they surely did miss out on is any type of audio whatsoever. When you load up the game, there is absolutely no music to speak off, nor is there any audio when you swipe one of the icons to solve a puzzle. The game is just completely silent, and it doesn’t make any sense, as the game is meant to be minimalistic, some simple sounds would only add to the whole design, rather than take it away.

Even for a simple and minimalistic game such as this, it does have its fair share of issues. The first one involves double tapping the screen, because if you do it on a location of the screen where a shape will show up, then these two shapes will clip into one another, and it makes solving the puzzle considerably more difficult. Even after that happens, resetting correctly doesn’t always fix the issue and will require a restart for it to be fixed. Secondly, whenever you double tap the screen to reset the puzzle, a red heart shows up. If you tap the red heart, then you will be treated to an ad. Once the ad is over, nothing happens. You don’t get anything for watching the ad, nor are you forced to watch it. I presume it’s there because the developer wanted to implement a life system, so that whenever you reset, your life would go down, until you had to watch an ad to replenish it. That’s only speculation, though, because the actual heart does literally nothing in terms of gameplay and simply loads up an ad for you.

Puzzle wise, I feel the game takes a fun and simple idea, and makes it work. It’s an easy game to play, but not the easiest to master, which is the type of thing you want in a puzzle game. However, another downside for the title is the fact that as soon as you start to swipe in one direction or the other, the icon will move instantly, rather than giving you a chance to think. At times, I’ll only be considering going for a certain move, so I’ll have my finger on the screen in preparation, but before I finish my decision it’s already been moved. The further you get into the game, the more frustrating it can get, especially when the puzzles start to dole out the difficulty.

Overall, Rocky Road has a fun and interesting premise that makes good use of the simple and minimalistic approach they were trying to go for. But the game gets bogged down by a number of issues, poor tutorial implementation, and lack of any audio whatsoever. It doesn’t hurt to give the game a go for yourself, but I can’t imagine having this as one of those games that you keep on your mobile device for more than a day.