REVIEW : Rollerdrome (PS5)
Everything comes back. After years of neglect, genres like skateboarding and horror appear to be making a comeback in new trends such as battle royales, games-as-a-service, and roguelikes. The game we have now resurrects the most well-known skateboarding formula: the one popularised by Neversoft; the studio, unfortunately, disbanded to focus on battle royale and games as a service. But let’s get away from the status of the industry and focus on what Rollerdrome has to offer.
survive in style
Roll7, the studio behind OlliOlli, created Rollerdrome, extreme sports and shooting game. In essence, this software blends the gameplay of the old Tony Hawk saga instalments with that of a third-person shooter. Anyone who is accustomed to the Activision franchise will feel uneasy right away until their brains acclimatise to the shooting mechanics and how to combine the two. That’s when the games begin.
Here we will find an adventure that knows how to perfectly mix both genres, where one does not work without the other, and which also has a very impressive staging. Thus, our goal is to destroy all of the enemies that emerge on the stage in the shortest amount of time and with the greatest possible score but to do so, we must shoot in slow motion, do tricks to obtain ammunition, travel around the level, and dodge rival attacks.
This means we’re always skidding, flipping, and shooting from unusual angles. The coordinated dodge is another component that adds to the action’s spectacle and is also required for victory.
Certain enemy weapons have a red or blue range indicator that briefly becomes white before striking us. By default, time slows down when shooting, but if we evade the hit with the circle and aim in that second, we will enter a “bullet time” mode in which our rounds cause more damage, which is necessary to finish off adversaries more rapidly.
Weapons, tricks and history
As we continue, we will unlock new weapons to use against different types of foes, and we will logically have to combine the former to destroy the latter more effectively. The weaponry is fantastic, well-designed and integrated, but the foes have yet to persuade us. They complete their mission, although at the end (especially in the second campaign, which we shall discuss shortly) they become fairly redundant. Not to mention the bosses, who turn out to be very bad.
Of course, the game’s main mode isn’t merely to kill and live. As in the Tony Hawk games, progressing requires completing a series of tasks. From earning a set quantity of points to doing a stunt in a specific place to killing a specific enemy with a specific weapon. We can go on to the next location once we have completed a set of objectives. Surprisingly, the zones are linked by sequences in the first person where the narrative takes control. It is a fairly simple plot about our protagonist’s competition with another athlete (with some surprises), but it is like they included this feature to give the universe more complexity.
Once the main story is completed, we unlock a second campaign, which is a kind of hard mode of the original campaign – don’t worry, we’re not spoiling anything for you because it’s something you see when you start the game. It’s quite good and even connects to the first story level, offering us all the adversaries and all the acquired weaponry from the start, implying fresh and challenging circumstances to face. The duration will vary greatly depending on the player, whether they want to complete the game, complete all of the missions, or compete for the highest positions on the leaderboard, but in our case, we spent nearly ten hours completing both campaigns and attempting to complete all of the challenges.
retrofuturistic comic
We also enjoyed Rollerdrome on a technical and audiovisual level. It bets on a comic style with cell shading that is successful for what it promises and that, due to its simplicity, allows for a terrific performance, at least on PlayStation 5, where we tested it. The new Sony console also includes haptic vibration and trigger resistance, which, while unremarkable, assist to improve the experience.
We do believe that this is a game that would have benefited from the ability to aim using DualSense’s gyroscope, which many creators refuse to incorporate for various reasons. Because the game is so fast-paced and full of tricks and targeting, the right hand’s thumb is constantly going from the face buttons to the thumbstick, and adding the ability to aim by moving the controller would have been fantastic. Finally, there is a soundtrack and a succession of relatively discrete sound effects that serve to accompany the action but are not distinctive.
patina fusion
Rollerdrome has been a lot of fun for us. It is true that it has some flaws and can become somewhat repetitive, but we believe that those of you who enjoy the classic Tony Hawk formula will find here a title that will provide you with many hours of entertainment, is satisfying to play, and allows us to freak out while doing all kinds of crazy things on roller skates while throwing grenades, hitting shotguns, and shooting with two hands.
