With No Man's Sky releasing last week, procedurally generated games are on everyone's lips. What was once an exciting new (or, at least, newly popular) technology for games has now become a warning for players. Minecraft did procedural generation perfectly, adding just enough categories of generation to create varying worlds without making the whole thing feel samey. And that's really the crux of the issue with procedural games: either the game has very little variety (to make generation easy), or there is so much variety in such a mild way that it all ends up feeling a bit like you are seeing the same level or place, even if the floor plan is different.
ROD: Revolt of Defense is a procedurally generated space exploration game, just like No Man's Sky, but unlike No Man's Sky, ROD keeps its scope small. Instead of a galaxy of 18 Quintilian planets, ROD has only a handful, and they aren't planets so much as floating grids, like chess boards, each grid piece having the chance to spawn a different resources. The goal of the game is to find six planets indicated on your map and destroy all of the towers on them to access the center of the small universe. To do this, you need to build towers on your own grid, which acts as your ship. The resources on each planet can give you stone and wood to build buildings and towers, fuel for your ship, chests which can contain the other resources and also money, artifacts which give you various buffs, and other people, which are used to man the towers or explore the various planets for resources. Some of the planets are inhabited, requiring you to defeat their towers before pillaging their homes, while others act as a store for you to buy resources, or a repair shop where you can purchase upgrades and heal any of your buildings.
It's a simple game, but it takes a bit of time to build up enough resources to take on the 6 planets in order to reach the end game, and that time can take its tole given the game doesn't have a save feature. But what the game accomplishes is a meditative atmosphere, partially due to its relaxing soundtrack, that most procedural games try to avoid. The relaxing atmosphere of ROD is counter to most game design: hook 'em fast, hook 'em hard, and hook 'em long. ROD doesn't want you to play it forever, and the procedural aspect gives it some replay value, but the game isn't a lot different on a new playthrough. And this is what procedural generation can do well right now: it can create worlds to explore and to get lost in, but not necessarily worlds with a lot to do. ROD doesn't excel in this by any means, but it does a solid job, and for $0.99 you can't really do much better.
ROD puts genre tropes from tower defense, procedural games, and exploration games into a blender and creates something simple and not too demanding. It's the opposite of the long-play style of No Man's Sky, and other procedural games. It even exists opposite Minecraft, with it's limitless world and customization. ROD exists within limits, both in time and scope, and lets you drift within it's borders.
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