Video Game / Will Rock

"Get Ready to Rock!"

Long ago, Zeus and the other Greek gods ruled over Greece from Mount Olympus. After the Roman invasion, the servants of Zeus were sealed away for good.

Present: Willbert Rockwell (Will Rock for short) is visiting Greece with his archeologist girlfriend Emma and her father when they got kidnapped by the ORA (Olympian Restoration Army), a fanatical movement whose members want to restore the old gods and force the two archeologists to break the seal to Zeus' prison. The god and his army of monsters are freed, and the ORA bring Will's fiancée to Zeus in order to offer her as a bride and kill her father.

With the help of Prometheus and with a lot of guns, Will must make his way through armies of monsters, weirdoes and beasts in order to stop Zeus before he conquers the world.

The game itself is not really well known, but has often been compared to the Serious Sam series.

This game provides examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo: Some of your weapons shoot Arrows on Fire, acid and petrifying gas.
  • The Cyclops enemies will eat some earth and spit fiery stones at you.
• Always Accurate Attack: Ephestus' ember toss homes on you slowly, as does Medusa's gaze attack. They're both slow-moving, but the former can be dodged if you get behind a wall, away from windows.With Medusa though, you don't have such luck.
• Ancient Grome: Pretty much the ambience mixes every possible combination of Greek and Roman ruins into one big setting.
• Armor of Invincibility: The Immortality Titan Power makes you unkillable for 30 seconds.
• Asteroids Monster: If you kill a Minotaur, he will split into two Blood Minotaurs.
• Automatic Crossbow: It also serves as Sniper Rifle and Kill It with Fire.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Special Guns (Sniper Crossbow, Acid, Medusa and Atomic Gun are undeniably cool, but they have low ammo. If used at short range, they can damage you as well.
  • The sniper crossbow in particular does a ton of damage, but has the problem of being a slow, precision weapon in a game where how many enemies you can kill every second translates directly into how long you can hope to survive.
• Badass Normal: Will Rock himself. While he does have Prometheus on his side, his interference is limited to giving him bottomless magazine for the pistol and power ups that aren't compulsory to win (except for bossfights).
• Bad Ass Boast: Will does many in game.
  Will:"I'll make you shit your diapers!"
• BFG: The Fireball Thrower, the Minigun and the Atomic Gun.
• Big Bad: Zeus
• Blatant Item Placement
• Booby Trap: Quite a few in earlier levels, usually Spikes of Doom, spears coming out of the walls and a Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom.
• Boring, but Practical: You can win the game using nothing but the Shotgun, Machinegun and Minigun.
  • The starting pistol isn't very powerful, but it has unlimited ammo and is fairly precise, so it gets pulled out often when there are only low-level enemies and not enough of them to warrant a high volume of lead.
• Boss Rush: on Mount Olympus. Sort of, since the first two are also Degraded Boss and you have to fight several of them.
• Bottomless Magazines: the Pistol. Justified example, as Prometheus states that he's giving it this power.
• Bullet Time: The Titan Motion works like this.
• Checkpoint
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Averted. There's a reason why enemies tend to storm you in large packs....
• Convection, Schmonvection: In a few circumstances you will walk inches away from hot boiling magma, but as long as you don't touch the stuff you're safe. The closest thing you get is a reddish-orange aura blurring the vision as you get closer to the magma.
• Deadpan Snarker: Will.
• Deadly Lunge: Some of the skeletons will jump at you in an attemped kamikaze assault.
• Degraded Boss: The Cyclops. It starts as a Powerful Boss and ends up being a Giant Mook in the next level. Also Hephaestus
• Dem Bones: Some of them were Centaurs.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Yes, you'll get the chance to Nuke Zeus to oblivion!
• Dual Wielding: Gladiators wield either daggers or morning stars and are adept at throwing them both at you.
• Easy Level Trick: Just before you fight Medusa, you'll get the Atomic Gun. Awesome name, launches explosive grenades. But it damages Medusa too slowly, and your health gets drained faster than you can damage her, forcing you to trips to get the health and armor pickups. The solution: switch to the Acid Gun and fire away. It will drain her health amazingly fast!
• Elaborate Underground Base: A whole large temple complex with passageways, turrets and walkways inside Mount Olympus.
• Emergency Weapon: A Shovel that can easily one-shot many enemies, if you can get close enough.
• Everything Fades: Corpses vanish pretty soon.
• Exploding Barrels: Why they're scattered around old Greek ruins is still a mystery..
• Fauns and Satyrs: They shoot arrows at you. And like Namekians, they don't have penises.
• Feathered Fiend: Eagle-like Harpies. They have the nasty habit of tossing explosive fireballs at you.
• Fireballs: The main weapon of some enemies and bosses.
• Flunky Boss: All of them. The Cyclops is fought in a large arena, Ephestus and Medusa have lots of followers in their nests and the way to Zeus' throne is guarded by an incredibly large amount of mobs.
• Four Is Death: There are Four main bosses. Yet, it may be a coincidence..
• Freeze Ray: The Medusa Gun, only with stone.
• Gatling Good: The Machinegun is weak, but can fire 1,000 bullets non-stop. The Minigun is limited but more powerful.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: ok, you could easly see Medusa coming as a boss the first time (since the whole area is named Medusa's Lair). However, her second unexpected appereance out of thin air on Mount Olympus is like this
• God Is Evil: Zeus. Not really surprising though, since he was a Jerkass God in greek Mythology.
• Living Statues: Some of them shoot lasers at you, while others will stand up and toss fiery disks and huge stones at you.
• Gorgeous Gorgon: Averted. However, she actually look like the traditional one
• Grimy Water: Only lava and acid will Insta-kill you, while on the other hand swimming in large pools/rivers of water will attract some huge hungry crocodiles...
• Hellhound: Orthuses attack by spitting fireballs and acid.
• Hollywood Geography: It's pretty clear that the names of the stages invoke Rule of Cool more than anything else: Act 4 alone has you leaving the Labyrinth to find yourself in the ruins of Eleusis... where somehow you can find a passage that sends you straight into the fiery bowels of Mount Olympus.
• Homing Projectile: Hephaestus' and Medusa's attacks are like this.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: By the end, Will is carrying around a pistol, a shotgun, a machinegun and an even bigger minigun, a bazooka-shaped rocket launcher, a crossbow, two atypical guns and a massive, nuke-tossing rocket launcher. Oh, and a shovel.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Will Win, Will Rock and Will Die, respectively.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Every single enemy with a weapon, and not just throwing daggers, tridents, spears and arrows, but also battle axes and morningstars!
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Will is largely guilty of this in game.
  Will (after killing a Minotaur):" Bullseye!"
  Will (facing a pack of lions and tigers):" That's a lot of Pussy!"
• Javelin Thrower: Some skeletons attack from afar with roman pila at their disposal. Centaurs will occasionally use their tridents as throwing spears.
• Jerk Ass God: Again, Zeus.
• Large Ham: Prometheus. Full stop.
  Prometheus: "TITAN DAMAGE!!"
• Lead the Target: Unusually for an FPS, the monsters get quite good at it on the hardest difficulty level. The usually life-saving strafing will get you killed if you move in a straight line.
• Lethal Lava Land: Part of the Underworld of Tartarus and the inside of Mount Olympus.
• Literally Shattered Lives: Enemies frozen solid by the Medusa Gun or, obviously, Living statues when killed.
• Locked Door: This occurs often, and you have to find the right key or kill a determined number of monsters.
  Prometheus: "Find the Key!".
• Ludicrous Gibs: Using the Machinegun or the Acid Gun on enemies implies this, but it's not shown.
• Medusa: She appears twice as a boss. That One Boss...
  • Oddly, she doesn't have her typical Taken for Granite powers..
• Misplaced Wildlife: The only possible explanation for the presence of tigers, lions and crocodiles in Greece.
• More Dakka: Minigun and Machinegun weapons.
• Mooks: Skeletons. Also the "Gladiators" and Satyrs.
• Mythology Upgrade: Since when did Minotaurs split in two when hit and Medusa shot homing fireballs out of her eyes?
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Water bodies often hosts large Crocodiles that swim around and bite at you. However, since they cannot leave the water and most of the watery areas in early levels are optionals, you may end up meeting them only late on in the game.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: Cyclops and Hephaestus are really hard to bring down without the proper weapon.
• Nuke 'em: The Atomic Gun literally melt enemies to ashes!
• Our Centaurs Are Different: Fast-moving monsters armed with tridents.
  Will: "So which one of your parents was the horse?"
• Our Gods Are Different: More in the physical sense of the word with Zeus, who's simply gargantuan.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: Minotaurs are common mooks.
• Orcus on His Throne: Zeus.
• Oxygen Meter: When you go underwater.
• Panthera Awesome: Mocked by Will.
  Will: "Nine lives my ass!"
• Papa Wolf: Will's girlfriend's father was a simple archeologist, but when the ORA took her away as sacrifice, he stood up and started gunning them down. Sadly, he got Killed Off for Real.
• Planet Heck: There's a level during act 3 called "The Underworld of Tartarus", which starts in a cavernous dungeon with a flowing lava lake to cross and hordes of skeletons running at you while "In the Hall of the Mountain King" plays. Despite this, it's only a transitional level which takes you outside in a more normal-looking setting soon enough.
• PowerUp: you can use the gold you find around to purchase the Powers of the Titans at a Titan Altar. You can get Immortality, Titan Motion and Titan Damage.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: The pistol has unlimited ammo and shoots as fast as you can click, which makes it quite practical against low-level enemies.
• Rise to the Challenge: The final level, Mount Olympus, has you climbing the colossal mountain from the inside.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Of the Exploding type.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Destroy some statues in order to gain gold.
• Shock and Awe: Zeus, of course..
• Shout-Out: many.
  Will (after killng a centaur):" Give my regards to Mister Ed!"
  • Besides, the Cyclops are based on the one that appears in Sindbad.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Averted, the Shotgun actually has an exquisite range.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Played straight, it's one of the best weapons.
• Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom: The final part of "The Labyrinth" is a chamber-variation of this trope, with colossal stone presses pounding down on the floor and ready to turn you into fine paste. Furthermore, while some of the crushers are rythmical, others only activate when you're under them.
• Spikes of Doom: Usually placed in pits. They're obviously a one-hit-kill.
• Spirit Advisor: Prometheus, during the game.
• Standard FPS Guns: In order:
  • Knife: The Shovel
  • Pistol: Your starting weapon, pretty weak but with bottomless ammo.
  • Shotgun: The Shotgun, of course.
  • Automatic Weapons: The Machine Gun (can shoot all the 1000 bullets in a row if needed, but not very strong) and the Minigun (needs to reload every 100 shots and is slow, but is deadly).
  • Grenades: The round type, found rather late in the game. They also seems to have elements of land mines in them.
  • Sniper Rifle: The Crossbow, which also has fiery bullets.
  • Rocket Launcher: The Fireball Launcher.
  • BFG: For both size and power, the Atomic Gun.
  • Gimmicky Weapon: The Acid Gun (makes enemy swallow up until they explode) and the Medusa Gun (releases a grey gas that slowly turns enemies into stones and shatters them).
• Stationary Boss: Zeus will stand still at the top of his throne and summon red thunderbolts to strike you down.
  • you can obtain an easy victory by reaching the top and going right under his feet, where he can't reach you
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Yes indeed! As soon as you see a wide-open space with lots of ammo, healthpacks and a new shiny weapon, prepare yourself!
• Taken for Granite: The Medusa Gun. Oddly, it can one-shot Living Statues.....
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: Enemies will often pop out of the ground when you pick an item.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: When you shoot Eroses, Harpies or Skeletons pack with the Fireball Thrower, the Minigun or the Atomic Gun may result in this.
• Too Awesome to Use: The Atomic Gun, because it's hard to find ammo for it.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The ORA (Olympian Restoration Army) are responsible for unleashing Zeus and the monsters on Earth and tries to offer Will's girlfriend to their God, but are nowhere to be seen in the plot proper. The most human-looking enemies you face are the half-naked gladiators.
• Winged Humanoid: the Ugly Cute Eros. They're also quite disturbing, since they literally cry like babies.
• You Have Failed Me: an interesting variation: Prometheus says this if you get killed.

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