With the Barbarians knocking at the gates, I’m sure that the Romans despaired at their lack of foresight in not building their great cities on wheels. Had they done that? Well, they could just roll off into the distance and away from those that menaced them. That’s pretty much the plan in Monsters Are Coming! Rock and Road, with the world beset by hordes of shadowy creatures and the distant promise of sanctuary at the Arch.
Right from the opening moments, it’s clear that Rock and Road is a fun mash-‘em-up of roguelite, bullet heaven and tower defence. You start with the core building of your city, trundling downwards toward safety as monsters spawn around you, and a black fog follows. As the hero peon, you have to scurry around nearby, gathering wood, stone and gold while also chipping in with some of the defensive effort.
Somewhat counterintuitively, those resources don’t actually pay for city upgrades and new buildings in the moment. Wood increases the speed of your towers firing, stone repairs damage, and gold can be spent on buildings and upgrades at safe zones, but the main way you’ll earn buildings is through levelling up and getting a choice of three buildings to place. That comes from gathering the experience gems dropped by fallen monsters and levelling up.
There’s more of the Vampire Survivors structure and gameplay feel to this game than it appears on the surface. Your hero also controls in that bullet heaven fashion, so you just move them around and they’ll automatically attack nearby enemies and harvest from scenery that you push them into, gathering a long snake of resources that you need to then lead back and deposit at your city. That’s the point that everything is banked, often levelling you up in a single go early on, and kicking you into the building screen.
This is where it starts to feel like tower defence. Your city sits in the centre of a square grid, and you can build out from that point. Each building takes up just a single square, and doesn’t have to be adjacent to another building, just in line with one, so you can immediately start to strategise with your building placement. Shorter-ranged turrets can go to the edges, longer-ranged mortars and ballistae more centrally, and then minion generators, stat farms and special buffing buildings nearby. Given the direction of travel, it’s easy to load up the rear of your city, but that can hurt you when waves of enemies spawn from the front and sides, so you do often need a multi-sided approach. I’ve repeatedly leant into having a skinny column, which helps with the need to clear scenery that your city can get stuck on and be vulnerable.
You can get adjacency bonuses – there’s a really helpful +50% damage building that wants to be central to a bunch of towers, while stat farms give 5% boosts by default and an additional +1% for each one in a chain. It’s fun trying to get boosts and synergies to work together, like leaning in on having minions and then a turret that gains 10% damage for every minion currently alive, or a building that makes fire deal 50% bonus damage to frozen enemies.
In a typical roguelite fashion, you need to roll with what the game randomly offers you. You pick from 10 cities to start with, and that can bring some fundamental changes – a left-to-right mirror city that doubles your buildings, a city where XP comes from harvesting not enemies – and Hard difficulty on each biome starts to add further challenges, so you might have an initial plan, but if the unlocks given to you are all for fire and ice, instead of minions or gold generation, and you don’t have the cash to re-roll the options then you’ll have to pivot. The handful of safe zone checkpoints also give you a chance to adjust or enhance without pressure, giving you a choice of new weapons for your hero, a chance to get a stash of resources and the shop to sink all of your cash into.
The overarching progression naturally brings you new cities to play with (luring you into these different playstyles), and unlocks more buildings that broadens the options you might be presented. Even if you fail, each run also generates overarching progression points, largely depending on how far you’ve travelled, which you then spend to give percentage boosts to various city and hero traits. Success, however, immortalises that first city in the Arch, piecing together a new sanctuary and giving a little script about each one’s method.
One of the things I appreciate about Rock and Road is how bitesized each run can be, coming in at under 30 minutes, with the spaces between checkpoints ramping up the pressure and building up to a randomised Kaiju-sized boss. They’ll generally just walk around your city alongside throngs of other enemies, while you scamper around and try to undo their abilities. One can make itself invulnerable by attaching to scenery that you need to destroy, another is a big spider queen where you need to race to destroy globs of enemies they spawn, and more.
Should you defeat them, it’s then a straight run to safety, and there’s a lot of joy to seeing the mass of arrows coming down from the Arch’s defensive walls, while your city fends off the chasing horde. But then that’s the end. You don’t roll through to the next biome and even greater challenges; your city is consigned to history and you start a new run. That makes it feel like you’ve seen all that the game has to offer by the time you’ve bested the standard difficulty – which I’d say isn’t that great a challenge. Playing on Hard is a big leap and requires that progression grind and more experimentation, but I feel this as a more casual option, compared to the more compulsive roguelites out there.
