Rollerdrome has one primary thing going for it, and that’s how damn good the core loop feels. Envisioned as a blend between a bullet-time third person shooter and Tony Hawk’s Proskater, Roll7 manage to make each system in Rollerdrome feel simple to comprehend, harder to master, and Very Cool to engage with. You can play it marginally safer and approach enemies cautiously, on a continuous defensive, but Rollerdrome’s campaign pushed me to embrace its combo system by making your level score one of the requirements for unlocking more levels. So in practice, the game quickly becomes about killing enemies as fast as possible while performing tricks in-between each kill to restore your ammo.
There’s a ton of nuance to this though. All four of your weapons have different tactical usages, and also use up the same ammo pool. With enough time, it becomes more and more clear how each enemy can be most effectively countered. Each enemy type operates differently, but can also be dodged to get a boosted slowdown mechanic that increases the damage you deal; this effectively means there’s a potential bonus to picking off snipers later, for instance, since their laser sights give constant opportunities to engage this mode. By the later levels, the game is a nonstop flurry of dodging, pulling off tricks, slowing down time midair to snipe across the map, and doing it over and over again without dying. It’s fantastic fun!!
It’s a shame then that the remainder of the game does little or nothing to add to this core experience. While I love the cell-shaded, 70s dystopia theming (and the reliance on bold, crisp coloring helps keep the action consistently clear), the game feels stuck between the more brutal implications of its death game premise and a Saturday morning cartoon affectation. For a game about murder on live TV, its narrative makes the strange decision of fixating on Rollerdrome’s behind the scenes corruption. I love that player character Kara Hassan is Arabic, and that we get some idea of their cool demeanor via slight bits of commentary at a few points, but the few story beats feel surprisingly muddled beyond this. It all feels so slight as to make me question why it exists at all; as-is, it feels like it hamstrings the game’s tone into something needlessly self-serious. But yeah! Had great fun skating, always nice to play something like this where you can feel yourself getting considerably better in real time!
There’s a ton of nuance to this though. All four of your weapons have different tactical usages, and also use up the same ammo pool. With enough time, it becomes more and more clear how each enemy can be most effectively countered. Each enemy type operates differently, but can also be dodged to get a boosted slowdown mechanic that increases the damage you deal; this effectively means there’s a potential bonus to picking off snipers later, for instance, since their laser sights give constant opportunities to engage this mode. By the later levels, the game is a nonstop flurry of dodging, pulling off tricks, slowing down time midair to snipe across the map, and doing it over and over again without dying. It’s fantastic fun!!
It’s a shame then that the remainder of the game does little or nothing to add to this core experience. While I love the cell-shaded, 70s dystopia theming (and the reliance on bold, crisp coloring helps keep the action consistently clear), the game feels stuck between the more brutal implications of its death game premise and a Saturday morning cartoon affectation. For a game about murder on live TV, its narrative makes the strange decision of fixating on Rollerdrome’s behind the scenes corruption. I love that player character Kara Hassan is Arabic, and that we get some idea of their cool demeanor via slight bits of commentary at a few points, but the few story beats feel surprisingly muddled beyond this. It all feels so slight as to make me question why it exists at all; as-is, it feels like it hamstrings the game’s tone into something needlessly self-serious. But yeah! Had great fun skating, always nice to play something like this where you can feel yourself getting considerably better in real time!