Rollerdrome

Fans of the famous British skateboard studio Roll7 can expect a new adventure that takes this studio and the gaming audience into an experience with completely different dimensions than previous experiences. Welcome to a dystopian world where people participate in a deadly sport called Rollerdrome. Our heroine Kara Hassan is the last participant at the Rollerdrome. Will she be able to survive?

This studio was known to the public for its OlliOlli skating games, which have been very popular over the years due to their masterful gameplay and high level of challenge. This project represents a change for the studio and the ambition of its projects to be an action game from a complete third-person perspective, aimed at the single-player level, while maintaining the skating mechanics that the studio is known for , maintains and transfers it into the dimension. This time the third. The experience is refreshing and unusual, and we greatly welcome this in a gaming industry that lacks innovation and sometimes suffers from a large number of duplicate releases. However, the transition certainly wasn’t easy, as the studio strived to maintain the distinctive character of its games.

Rollerdrome: A Dystopian Skating Adventure

The story is set in the future, specifically 2030, and revolves around a blood sport called Rollerdrome. In this sport, the player fights against enemies who are “house players,” as they are called. It’s a survival game. Life or death, to be or not to be, the last participant in the game. This sport is none other than our hero Kara Hassan, who fights for survival against the house players and tries to finish them off before they finish her off. In fact, from the first moment we felt that the game was inspired by Stephen King’s famous novel “The Running Man”, which is one of the masterpieces of science fiction novels. However, the narrative effort in the game is simple, and it is behind the scenes to focus on the gameplay.

Speaking of gameplay, we have mixed feelings about Rollerdrome, something we didn’t quite expect at the start of the game. The idea of ​​the game is to use firearms to eliminate enemies, dodge their attacks and show acrobatic skills in order to refill ammunition. Kara skates automatically and the player only needs to press the forward movement button at first and then move right or left to change direction. You’ll feel like you’re more flexible than Tony Hawk when skating, climbing not only ledges, but also walls and jumping between skyscraper roofs. But we definitely liked the game’s support for the DualSense controller and the pressure resistance when shooting, as well as the feeling of running on the edges thanks to the vibration and sound of the controller.

Intense Gameplay and Acrobatic Skating

As usual for this studio, the challenge increases quickly and the enemies begin to use a huge arsenal of weapons to eliminate Kara, including heavy firearms, explosives, batons and everything you can imagine. However, Kara, on the other hand, has a large arsenal of weapons and we do not doubt that fans of action games will find many of them… Eliminating your opponents in diverse and flashy ways is fun and we can imagine from now on , how many animated images (gifs) there are), maybe we’ll see. Kara has another very effective and very important weapon that players will rely on a lot, namely slowing time.

Kara can slow down time while shooting, which is a very important skill, and you will rely heavily on her to hit an enemy with consecutive shots or even control some shots that require certain mechanics to deal major damage to the enemy. such as a gun. Players can also dodge enemy bullets and weapons. You can be sure that there will be a barrage of bullets and flying weapons waiting for you in Rollerdom. The Rollerdom forces the player into confrontations and the player must eliminate opponents to refill the energy meter. The stage ends when the player manages to eliminate all enemies and there are many challenges in each stage of the game. An attempt is made to add variety to the experience, such as killing multiple enemies in a certain period of time or something similar.

Challenging Combat and Time Manipulation

The problem with the game is that the feeling of repetition sets in quickly. There are a large number of confrontations and it feels like you are repeating the same thing over and over again. If you lose, the player returns to the start of the confrontation and there are no save points or anything similar, even if the rounds are relatively short. But that’s not all, as control caused us problems in the open combat arenas, where we sometimes accidentally fell back and forth between huge buildings. Graphically, this game is beautiful and has an artistic style similar to comics. The artistic sense of these designers is undoubtedly high, with bright, uniform colors and striking lines, and there is no problem at all with the visual language that the game uses to communicate with players. As for the sounds, they are unforgettable and we don’t mention anything about them even if they aren’t. However, this is very demanding since it is not The Witcher or Final Fantasy, but it is enough to integrate the player into the exciting action atmosphere, and that is also acceptable.

Repetitive Gameplay and Stunning Visuals

In fact, this game gave us the feeling that it was more of a concept that could be the core of a much bigger and better game in the future, but the current product is a bit poor and not sufficiently diverse in content. However, the game represents a bold product and is an attempt to get out of the box and not rely on the comfort zone. We recommend trying it before purchasing.