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dkirschner's Rollerdrome (PC)

[July 22, 2024 04:06:28 PM]

This one didn't land with me. It's like Tony Hawk with guns. And I just played Solar Ash, which had skating, in a way, but this one is more Tony Hawk because you have to do tricks. Note that I always disliked skating and snowboarding games where you are supposed to learn tricks and rack up points with combos, just skating around urban environments or whatever. I always found them really boring. So, I immediately was like "ugh" with all the tricks.

But that's only half of it. The other half is combat. The premise of the game is that you're a new entry in this year's Rollerdrome tournament. In Rollerdrome, contestants are pitted against "house players," who try to disable the contestants. You have to eliminate all the house players to clear the level and move on in the tournament. You not only need to eliminate all the house players, but you need to complete various achievements (reach a certain high score, do certain types of tricks, kill enemies in certain ways, etc.) because subsequent rounds of the tournament are locked behind you having completed a certain number of achievements.

This all started out pretty fun for me, skating around, shooting people, dodging sniper fire. It quickly becomes really hard though, as new enemy types are introduced and there are more and more of them. It becomes something like a 3d bullet hell! Except in bullet hells, you can see everything because they're usually top-down. In this one, you'll get nailed from every angle, and you'll die constantly without knowing what hit you. You'll end up with four guns, two of which also have a sort of skill shot you can do. And you can dodge and slow time. Getting perfect dodges, doing tricks, grinding, etc. are how you refill your ammo. Killing enemies is how you refill your health. Doing both is how you rack up combo points. So, you cannot avoid doing tricks, or else you'll run out of ammo and there's no way you can dodge all the stuff flying at you for that long! Also, of the four heavily movement-focused games I have recently played, this one had the least fluid, least precise of them all (behind Neon White [which was perfect], Velocity 2x, and Solar Ash). It's hard not to compare.

I was going to quit in the semifinals because it was getting too hard for me and because the narrative is practically nonexistant, and therefore nothing else was motivating me, until I saw that I could turn on invincibility and infinite ammo. Well there we go! No regrets, I turned it on, plowed my way through the rest of the game, including the last boss fight, trying to get achievements without fear of dying, and had some fun before finishing. To the people who beat this without cheats, I am impressed! The final boss looked crazy.

I definitely thought this would be a bit different than it was. I expected less focus on arena combat and something more akin to roller derby or Rocket League (i.e., multiplayer). It is baffling to me that there is no multiplayer. This seems designed for it! And I always like a good racing combat game, so I admit to being disappointed that it wasn't roller derby with guns. That would have appealed to me more than Tony Hawk with guns.