Grab a shotgun, load up those pistols, and strap on a regulation standard face guard as Gamespace gets a hands-on preview of Rollerdrome, the best blaster on eight wheels that we’ve ever seen.
Developer Roll7 and publisher Private Division announced Rollerdrome back in June as part of the PlayStation State of Play conference. Sounding like a mix of Rollerball, Doom, and Tony Hawks, this tricky new FPS is certainly as off the wall as it sounds. Set in the unforgiving future of 2030, this new performance blood sport is all that the upper echelons of society need to keep the public mollified and distracted. Strapping competitors to a set of skates, adding in some projectile combat, and injecting this ethos into a do or die arena, Rollerdrome isn’t an overly complex idea, but much like the phenomenal OlliOlli World, this brand-new game looks set to be an addictively brutal ballet.
Looking Sharp
There’s a swift change of direction for Rollerdrome. Unlike the soft inclusive edges of OlliOlli World, Rollerdrome is rendered like R rated visual novel. Hard edges and solid muted colors feel like a nod to the early eighties as players waltz into the opening moments of this adventure. Outfits that decorate the early locker room are deliberately basic, the electronic soundtrack is stripped back, and even the inclusion of a shopping mall arena dips into urban arenas of The Running Man. It all comes together to give this a far more mature edge, without ever having to roll into excessive amounts of bloodshed.
Thankfully it’s not all run and gun straight away, there is a chance to get acquainted with this barbarous free rolling fight. Much like many of Roll7’s previous titles, Rollerdrome doesn’t provide a huge barrier to entry. The initial tutorial puts players in the skates of a newbie to this league, a freshly qualified competitor in the big time, and before you get to pick up some pistols, you’ll need to prove you can at least entertain the baying crowds. Pulsing off with a simple flick of the stick, Rollerdrome doesn’t need much more than a quick pores of the analog stick to get moving, change direction, jump, and perform tricks. The control system is almost unintuitively simple, making movement a fire and forget system. The reason for this becomes obvious later on, as mandatory training tests unfold between arenas. Increasing complex manoeuvres become the norm as quick-witted combinations take inspiration from the more traditional skating sims to pull of jumps, spins, and tricks. Each of the game’s arenas, may be decorated with a different array of backdrops, but they all add in plenty of dangerous ledges, high walls, open ditches, ramps, and rails to ride along.
What begins with a simply jump and grind can easily be built into a series of cool co-ordinated combos filled with overhead flips, grabs, grinds, and spins that require exquisite grace under pressure. Well, what we actually mean is ‘under fire’.
Under Pressure
Any bloody good competition needs some henchmen to slaughter, and somehow that’s exactly what the future holds. Armed with a variety of weapons, players don’t simply get to take a twist on Descenders. There’s a brutal single player campaign where, in between catching air, you’ll need to pull off some trick shots if you don’t want to be eliminated from the competition. Thankfully, beginners won’t have much trouble with this point and shoot. They won’t even need to point, if they don’t want to. As if it’s a basic tenant of Roll7’s game design, players an easily unload as the game auto aims during a drive by attack, but more competent performers can layer in a bullet time system, dodges, rolls, and even pick off AI opponents via line of sight using, pistols, shotguns, and even grenade launchers. This isn’t everything that combat entails, but as an explosive introduction to take out a gang of grunts that can’t exactly keep up with the player character.
If It Bleeds
This all comes together when combat kicks off for real, int eh NAME. Left to purely speed and shoot, there would be limited reason to bother looking to grind out success in the ring. However, ammo is far from plentiful. By binding ammo to high flying tricks, Rollerdrome ensures that this experience is far more than bashing heads and moving on. Players who perform dangerous and daring tricks get more ammo added into their armoury, and suddenly things get interesting.
By locking weapon use behind skating tricks, Rollerdrome forces players to think on their feet or get blown off them. As a few hapless street thugs become a range of walking bullet sponges, snipers, grenades, a range of other equally deadly adversaries enter the ring. With this escalation, competitors are forced to dodge out of action, pick their time to pirouette, and even grind along walls to get away from landmines. With limited time to generate new ammo, weapon selection becomes incredibly important and wasting shots is foolish. While chaos erupts around a repurposed shopping mall or an abandoned snow-capped helipad, complex in game combat becomes crucial. The option to engage bullet time and shoot an enemy on highlighted beats causes crucial extra damage and catching the house brawlers in explosive cones of fire is doubly rewarding.
This crescendo of fire and flight is an awesome experience that a novice or experienced skaters can pick up, but some might find difficult to master. You’ll be able to simply head straight and fire blindly, but that will only get you so far. To progress in the Rollerdrome league and unlock new stages in this campaign players will need to score well and chalk off a range of challenges. Whether that’s collecting a set of multiplier bonuses that hang eagerly in the air or performing a specific move while blowing away the computer-controlled opposition, these objectives prove to be a slightly more unforgiving obstacle than OlliOlli’s requirements, as they should be. During our limited time with Rollerdrome, we had a blast blitzing through a range of environments that all play to a particular set of strengths, while waves of enemy spawns caused increasing levels of chaos and make the simple job of skating for your life an infinitely more complex task than going from scrolling along Radlandia. Rollerdrome takes the same layered complexity that Roll7 introduced so well in their recent skating series, adds big guns, grenade launchers, and blows it all out into an eighties inspired murder match that we can’t wait to explore again.
For more on Rollerdrome, check out the official trailer above and head over to the official website before it makes a perfect landing across PC and PlayStation platforms on 16 August 2022.
