Rollerdrome is a very simple game: clearly inspired by the movie Rollerball, you assume the role of Kara Hassan, one of the competitors of a violent sport that mixes online skating with mortal shootings. Kara’s goal is to become Rollerdrome’s number one, the relentless tournament around the game’s campaign; Your goal is to dominate the set of Kara’s movements and hers limited but versatile arsenal of it to complete the numerous objectives of each level, first, and achieve the best scores you can, ultimately.
For practical purposes, Rollerdrome is played as an impossible mixture between Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Vanquish. The movement is constant. Sliding through progressively more complex and large levels, you must skillfully combine jumps, Grabs and grinds (a territory that roll7, the study that signs this, knows well: yours is also the brilliant Olliolli World, one of the best throws of 2022) with precise shots to eliminate all enemies. It is one of those games so brilliantly compact that it seems ridiculous to describe its most account systems; What it does is understood intuitively but has a roof so high that each game is not only different but also more frantic, deeper and more aggressive than the previous 1. Even so, let’s try.
The base is in skating and shot. The first thing is simple: you advance skating and you can, almost identical to Tony Hawk’s Pro skater (even in the buttons used for it), make different tricks when you throw yourself in the air. First you rehearse some Grab and a few simple grinds; Soon you are making wallrides that allow you to advance with grace or reach sites where otherwise it would be impossible to land. The shot does not have too many complications. With a button you have and with another shot, first with a couple of guns and little by little, as you exceed levels, with more complex and lethal weapons, until they make a total of four: a shotgun is added to the arsenal, a spear and An energy rifle. They are not many weapons, but they give you everything you need to, in combination with your skating _skills, keep the combo active, which ends up resulting in a greater score if you put enough tricks in the mixture but only go up in one way: killing enemies.
But what makes these basic elements stand out is the countless ways in which they intersect and enhance each time, all the time, from the beginning to the end of each game, on each map. You can notice how a piece moves thanks to the fact that two others push it, and at the same time those two move because many others push them, and so on it it is very clear to you if it was before the chicken or the egg: what is the source of the original movement that drives the stylish arcade action of Rolledrome. Health and ammunition are sufficiently scarce to have a worth having an eye on them all the time, but recovering them is as easy as play spending the bullets of the gun also spends the ammunition of the grenade launchers; six bullets are thus equivalent to a grenade), and the fallen enemies release items that recharge your life. The movement is in the center of everything; A tense situation can force you to deviate from that until only a few seconds it was your way to collect some life or generate, Rick by, three or four cartridges for the shotgun. The enemies themselves are designed in such a way that they force you to rethink the strategy all the time; It is almost impossible to plan your departure, beyond having a general idea of how you are going to face the waves of enemies that appear at a level. The sniper, surely the great star of the game, threatens you from the distance all the time with its red laser, forcing you to dodge frequently but at the same time opening without stopping windows of opportunity to make a perfect elusive and activate an improved version of time Standard bullet (which is activated whenever you aim, a perfect license that fits perfectly with the auto aim omnipresent in rollerdrome) that makes your shots do more damage; Not much more damage, but the right one so that at the most advanced levels you have the mathematics behind the design of the game all the time in your head. In case you needed another layer, each weapon has a small peculiarity that adds a rhythmic touch to its use. The agile guns allow you to empty the charger if you get to press the button fast enough, even riddling the enemies that teleport after receiving the first shot; The powerful shotgun has a kind of active shot that increases the damage it does (50%would swear; so round and transparent look like their figures) if you squeeze the trigger at the precise moment; The acroble energy rifle can be loaded if you have enough time to do it by keeping the press button; The destructive launched draws a hard arch to calculate but extremely satisfactory when you see the projectile reaching the exact point you wanted.
Rollerdrome shootings are an extremely well-defined, so marked and explicit resources that allows Roll7 to design levelsalmost too complicated for the good of the game itself, and to you to make the necessary calculations to overcome them by confusing that seem. The snipers die of two normal shotguns, or one well activated and three shots, or one well activated if you do it after a perfect elusive; Enemies with shield are a task if you have to fold them normal, but they can fall very fast if you manage to link three perfect shotgun shots after a single perfect elusive. Each enemy has, as you point in your head, different ways of being eliminated with different amounts of shots of each weapon; What is at first a colorful but clumsy demonstration of skating with gun Different distances and heights, all while with the corner of the eye you are looking for a good way to get out of the next quarter pipe, as long that terric the trick with which you try to recover the ammunition you just spent a second.
If you have played Olliolli World, you probably know that feeling of, especially playing at a certain level, at the same time knowing perfectly what you are doing at all times and having no idea what happens in your hands. Something similar happens in Rollerdrome, although there is something more distance between you and the game, which never manages to be so intuitive as skateboarding. Hence, the bullet time does so well, that it gives you very short but constant breathing to think a little what you have to do, or the multiple accessibility options, which offer help of all kinds to make the game less demanding and ultimately Most enjoyable instance for those who fail to deal with the demolishing challenge that Rollerdrome is. No shame to use as many aid as necessary: it is worth experiencing the pure kinetic pleasure of Rollerdrome clashes, in which mechanics, graphics and music merger to create a rambling experience without any apparent effort. It is his way of being, and now. It is worth skating about the sun, although you need a little assistance.
One of the accessibility options makes, in fact, that the game is a little better, in my opinion. To advance in the Rollerdrome campaign (s), we must not only exceed the levels, organized in the brackets of the tournament that gives name to the game, but also to fulfill a number of the seemingly optional objectives offered in them. Some are simpler than others: some ask you to get the five objects, for example, or make a concrete grind at any point of the level; Others encourage you to make tricks in more specific places, sometimes a bit complicated, or eliminate enemies while you do this or that thing. Others ask you to finish a whole level in a single combo; others, that you overcome the records of other characters in the game, hight scores that usually demand to play precisely and know each level well. Until a certain number of objectives at the levels that you have unlocked cannot access the next bracket, a truqui to extend the duration of the game that is not bad on paper (after all, completely completing objectives forces you to practice, to play better, before accessing more complicated and demanding levels) but for my taste it never works as expected. In reality, it is frustrating to finish a level and not be able to advance but have to go back; Frustrates even more collide with a collection of objectives that you do not know if you can meet, or have to repeat the same level more times to get a score or a time. In the accessibility options this requirement can be deactivated: thus, one level takes you to the next and now. Simple and effective.
Personally I turned to this help only at the end because I had not seen it before; If not, I would surely have had it activated until the campaign is finished. Only in part I would have done it because of the bad taste of crossing my constantly interrupt it to repeat levels. That is not what Kara Hassan was doing. Among groups of levels there are small scenes in the first person in which you explore different spaces related to the Rollerdrome championship. So you know more about the different competitors and the luck that runs (spoiler: it is not a mortal sport for anything), about the way in which the competition is organized and executed and on the society in which a sport like this has flourished, Above all, in which people kill and die in the name of the show, to calm the voracity of an audience that the media keeps occupied while around it the world burns, hyperprivatized and managed from the shadows by corrupt forces that, yes, They also have their interests that Rollerdrome is the king sport and his athletes, television stars and magazines, with interviews here and there and action figures with which to reproduce their feats in your own home. These scenes are more or less scarce and brief but they are full of pampering and good ideas, of subtle mechanisms that put you in a universe (very inspired, I already say, in rollerball, where the bread and circus with which the population is distracted Of the weaves of those who send it is also a mortal sport) all the more attractive the less explicit their pieces are: you read and listen to talk about demonstrations, police charges, scandals, machinations that are there but that in reality they neither come nor come to you, They don’t seem to cross the mission of your life, which is to become the great Rollerdrome champion. But how will the thing not go with you? Are you not an accomplice of the same great circus that keeps people stunned, looking elsewhere, while stealing the future? It is a context that seems as pertinent today as it was in the 70s, when rollerball was released, and even more in a medium like the video game.
It is a less perfect game than Olliolli World, there is no doubt, but still Rollerdrome is proud and manages to raise the flag of project B, the most limited scope_scope game but that precisely for that reason makes the talents of each Person involved in him shine more strongly, or with greater definition. Speaking two games in the same year is not a small feat, if you ask me; That the two are as personal, as powerful, as intelligent and resounding as Roll7 has marked is something that happens very rarely. It is an amazing arcade disguised as a science fiction film of the 70s; It is a story about oppression and resistance of avant-garde shots game. It is just the type of game that Roll7 seems to enjoy doing; That is why it is a luck that has been demonstrating that he knows how to do it so well.
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