Project Rolo

Project Rolo is a first-person shooter that willingly or unwillingly recreates the feel of some retro games that have been released about a decade ago. It’s a FPS that is borderline bad but somehow isn’t terrible.

In the history of FPS games that offer mouse-look as a feature, basic movement is given by the W,A,S,D keys but in Project Rolo’s case, you go forward, back, left and right using the arrow keys. Which is not something necessarily bad but immediately becomes so when you notice that you reload using R, jump using Space and sprint using the left side Shift key.

With a keymapping like that three-handed gamers would be really happy. On the other hand, you won't need to jump almost at all, reloading is done automatically for most weapons and sprinting is unnecessary since your character already moves very fast just by walking.

Visually, Project Rolo is best served when you’re curious to know how shooters looked between 1993 and 2000. It’s not bad but the textures are of low quality and aren’t all that charming.

You start off in a room accompanied by the voice of what seems to be a digital companion and adviser. It directs you to a gun and from that point on it’s all about shooting bad guys that look exactly the same.

Since there is no background story to the game, you can assume you’re in some kind of cloning facility where someone is working hard on creating an army. Project Rolo lacks in the storyline department and has you simply wandering through corridors emptying clips. It’s all linear gameplay that makes the entire thing feel brutally repetitive just after shooting the fourth enemy soldier.

To wrap things up, Project Rolo is best tried out when you want to see an example of how things that are not thought through look like. It somehow feels like an experiment that got abandoned along the way.