I’m rollerblading at top speed and still have a sniper’s laser sight fixed to my torso. I wait for the last moment, just as they are about to pull the trigger, to dodge the oncoming bullet and fire my rifle – straight at the beast swinging a spiked club at my forehead. After heading for the nearest halfpipe, I grab the nose in the air to refill my pistol ammo and land on a grind rail – heading straight for the gunners.
Now it’s just a case of firing a few homing missiles out of the air, triggering slow motion, and unloading my twin pistols – all before the wall is safe. I feel like a fighter on wheels with a gun. I look like a high-speed death suit. And I’m having so much fun.
This is Rollerdrome, an upcoming single-player arena shooter from Roll7 that enlists you in the titular fictional blood sport. Comprised of a series of deathmatches strung together in an overarching single-player narrative campaign, Rollerdrome challenges you to battle waves of enemies in battle arenas littered with skatepark paraphernalia. With nothing but a thin arsenal of weapons in hand and a pair of roller skates on your feet, you’ll pump combos, brush off challenges and perform a bunch of silly tricks worthy of the most extreme sports games.
While lead producer Drew Jones succinctly describes Rollerdrome as a “roller-skating shooter,” fans of the studio may recognize it more as a combination of two of Roll7’s previous releases. Combining the smooth cellular-hued skating of Olli Olli with the frenetic arena survival of Laser League, the game took a strikingly odd premise to what could be its zenith.
“The goal was not just to make a game that was a mash-up of genres, but to make a game that was its own genre,” says head of QA David Jenkins. “And not have a game that’s just, ‘Oh, it’s a skating game and you can shoot people in it,’ or ‘Oh, it’s a shooting game and you happen to be wearing roller skates.’ It’s quite a separate kind of system.”
Beyond Thunderdrome
After spending a few hours playing the first six levels of the game, the skating half really got me. Rollerdrome is robust enough to give you a range of tricks to perform – spins, grabs and grinds – and intuitive enough to make even the most advanced techniques easy to pull off – like acid drops down a quarter pipe or time extensions you for broadcasting. Everything is buttery smooth, with a fluidity that sells the magnificence of your violent performance.
Gunplay is not excluded from this equation either. With nearby mines to dodge, laser sights to dodge, homing missiles to dodge and blazing beams of ionizing energy to think about, the frenetic nature of Rollerdrome is managed by a generous aiming system and great bullet timing. Your aim will automatically move to enemies when you’re in close proximity, and slow motion can be engaged to let you pour hell on your opponents while moving at breakneck speed.
“It’s kind of gung-ho; throw caution to the wind,” says Jones. “These enemies are out to get you and you must face them. If you try to play it a little more conservatively, you won’t get as much [from the game] as you would if you simply took the fight to the enemies.
The shooting of Rollerdrome is simple but elegant. It felt like a rudimentary imitation of the Doom reboot
A nifty ammo and health system fuels that aggression further, as you’ll need to dispatch enemies to replenish your fragile health bar while performing various tricks to refill your limited ammo supply. Starting with a pair of pistols, I soon unlocked a rifle and grenade launcher to engage in combat, and was impressed with the mileage the game managed to wring from even this small set. You’ll need to think carefully about your weapons, switching between them at a pace to bypass each enemy’s defenses.
It’s simple yet elegant. Rollerdrome’s shooting felt like a rudimentary imitation of Doom Eternal to me, as you dance between enemies, switch weapons on the fly and barrel forward to keep your health and ammo afloat. Add to that the array of skill challenges that come with each level – which range from performing a specific trick, to wall grinding a specific object, to achieving a specific score – and the scope for mastery is vast.
False start
Where Rollerdrome starts to lose its performance, however, is outside of deathmatches. Set in a retro-futuristic dystopia, darkened by monopolistic corporations that quell civil unrest by televising hypnotic blood sports, Rollerdrome punctuates its levels with bits of world-building. Between each set, you’ll walk around empty locker rooms and gyms, read newspaper clippings, or listen to radio segments to get a whiff of the world beyond.
“There’s such an obvious well of inspiration in ’70s genre films like Rollerball and Running Man,” says Jones. “So once we had the blood sport element, a lot of the setting and the theme and the timing just fell into place.”
Not that I was particularly impressed. The main plot is presented to you so sporadically and with so little fanfare that I’m pretty much completely out of the narrative. I found myself more intrigued by my latest high score than the fate of this fictional world. A series of deadly roller-skating matches might be fertile ground on which to tell a story of corporate moral turpitude, but because that story is so detached from the main events of the game, it’s little more than forgettable. Hopefully, Rollerdrome’s narrative promise will flourish in full playthrough.
Wheeler-merchant
The most surprising thing about Rollerdrome is its single-player exclusivity. The idea of shooting an arena on roller skates sounds like the perfect starting point for the next hit battle royale or left-field racing phenomenon in Rocket League mode. Since Roll7 already has experience in multiplayer development, why approach Rollerdrome as a single-player experience?
“The trap we really didn’t want to fall into was going too broad into a new video game subgenre,” says Jones. “We had enough on our plates and enough to understand the core idea of the game and the single player idea that we started with. We really wanted to pick a focused experience and just push it as far as possible.”
For the most part, Roll7 seems to have done just that. Rollerdrome may stumble on the convoluted launch pad of scattered storytelling, but it offers such a finely balanced mix of skating and shooting that you’ll find yourself engrossed anyway. Maybe it’s time to dust off those rollerblades that have been sitting in the garage, because by the time Rollerdrome comes out on August 16th, you’re going to want to hit the skatepark.
https://www.techradar.com/news/rollerdrome-is-doom-eternal-on-roller-skates-and-its-as-good-as-it-sounds/
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8964133/acastro_170731_1777_0006_v1.jpg "Two more executives are leaving Apple")
