After playing the Jon St. John voiced Rochard, “I don’t know whether to pick my nose or scratch my butt,” to quote the hero. While these may sound like the lesser of two evils (they really aren’t), Rochard is actually a really fun PlayStation Network game, it’s just hard for me to nail what kind of game it set out to be.

That said, Rochard nails and combines many gameplay mechanics far better than the vast majority of its downloadable and AAA counterparts. The game is spent in a 2D perspective fighting, shooting, jumping, and solving. I’m going to say Rochard felt like a fun but mostly linear Metroidvania (if this isn’t an oxymoron). And in Metroidvania form, Rochard receives power ups and expansions that help the gameplay evolve until the end of this 6-7+ hour intergalactic blue-collar journey.

I think I was enjoying Rochard most when I was solving its puzzles and using the recoil jump. Door jammers of various colors litter the land; each color has its own peculiarity. The red door is anti bio-matter, so Rochard, being the living breathing, son of a bitch he is, under no circumstance can pass through. However, he can fire weapons and fling boxes through the doors with a lassoing gun power-up to help him.

Blue doors prevent anything but bio-matter pass. Put those together, and I was having a puzzling good time. Add orange doors that have an affinity for absorbing ammo and explosions and white doors that don’t let anything at all pass through, and players may feel like they stepped into a Portal-esque game, with various rules on what can and can’t go in and out of all the doors.

Even fighting enemies sometimes felt like a puzzle. Rochard can easily run and gun, and even ram enemies up close with the brute force of the gun. However, players can opt to be sneaky and hurl boxes with the gun’s first grappling feature. Throughout the game, each tactic becomes obsolete; the gun can eventually throw grenades, timed explosions, and even enemies themselves in the end.

After the mid-point of the game, the puzzles felt much less in number, and a couple of the powers at the end seemed very hastily introduced and explored. I also died much more frequently in the enemy-centric, two final chapters, despite Rochard’s health automatically regenerating when not under duress. Fortunately, Rochard offers several checkpoints in each scene.

While I may not sound happy at this point, the recoil jump thankfully made for some sublime exploration and platforming. I wasn’t expecting this gem of a mechanic. But to explain the recoil jump, I have to spill the beans on another game-changing mechanic: with some tweaking in each stage’s main frame, Rochard is able to lower the gravitational pull. This allows Rochard to jump much higher and pick up items that were too heavy otherwise.

All of these variables mix to help Rochard complete the recoil jump. Players must first use the gun’s grappling feature to grab an object. While Rochard jumps in the air under reduced gravity, he must then release the grappled item while pointing down, and the propulsion will give Rochard added height to his jump.

All of this is very fun, until some sections where I need the low gravity often. I can sense the developers wrestled with this light weighted, slow feeling to keep the physics realistic at the expense of essentially slowing down a portion of the game.

I like doing super jumps and recoil jumps, though, despite them happening in slo-motion. The only things I really didn’t enjoy taking too long were some of the load times I faced (I sometimes counted to 30) after dying in the enemy heavy second half of the game.

Rochard gets much harder than this

Rochard has a good amount of collectibles that I kept even in death. In addition to upgrades for health, ammo, and weapons, there are well-hidden gold trophies for the hunter/gather in us all. The game explains how to use a flashlight early on, but I don’t recall using it to solve a puzzle or uncover a collectible, so I’m not sure what greater purpose it served. Even its primary function of lighting areas didn’t seem necessary.

Rochard’s hero is a heavy set hillbilly, and his dialogue made me never take him too seriously. Recoil Games follows the “fat guy, skinny girl” formula by giving Rochard a slimmed down, sexy Native American companion. Recoil wrote an intriguing narrative involving her heritage that unfortunately feels abrupt in the end, but I won’t spoil past this sentiment.

Rochard offers some replayability, but because of the ending, I don’t want to play Rochard again until there is more story. Those who want to get 100% can select scenes from each of the game’s 5 chapters and will be told how many “somethings” were collected. I don’t know if the number shown is the total of collectibles and upgrades, or just the trophies. I also never knew when what I collected was the “right amount” in a scene. Though eventually I didn’t care, because I was genuinely having fun most of the time in Rochard.

Releasing patches nowadays is the norm, so I wanted to give Recoil my laundry list to make the really fun Rochard experience “tighter than a frog’s butt.” How Rochard knows this sensation is beyond me, but I appreciate Recoil Games humor and various mechanics and suggest all PSN users try the demo as soon as possible.

[A copy of Rochard was provided for review. Rochard sells for $9.99, or $7.99 for PS+ users and is worth every cent.]