Rollerdrome – Test: The style budget for 2022 would then be all…

Enviable, playable mix of skating and shooting, which is unparalleled in style and form this year.

The genre of dystopian future sports was once all the rage. Between 1990 and 2010, which sport was not diligently transformed into a crude caricature of itself with the use of weapons and black humor? Rollerdrome reinvigorates that trend, fusing the enviably fluid skate gameplay of a Tony Hawk – albeit on roller skates – with the sensibilities of a modern forward-facing shooter, and really rides it.

Rollerdrome from the OlliOlli makers at Roll7 puts both skating and shooting behind the actual game content: check off a series of tasks with as little interruption and score demolition as possible. This means that movement and aiming are automated to a certain extent. There isn’t a single trick to stretch out on, because protagonist Kara Hassan just lands every trick on her own. And targeted anyway with a generous override. There is still more than enough to do every second in the blood sport organized by a megacorporation in 2030.

You’ll be constantly pursued by heat-seeking missiles, targeted by a different sniper every few seconds, or pushed into the crowd by baseball-bat-wielding enemies. Your task: Always keep moving, maximize the flow and use the arena in such a way that you keep the threat level low or at least constant so that everything doesn’t fly in your face.

What is particularly remarkable is how Rollerdrome intermeshes its individual systems. If the magazine is empty, you reload it using tricks. If you dodge a sniper shot at the last moment, it sets a super slow motion with bonus damage – we said ‘bullet time’ back then – and defeated enemies drop life energy on the spot. Like a shark that cannot stand still, constant movement is the meaning of your life in Rollerdrome.

You quickly fall into that certain frenzy that the best of these “flow” games unleash, where you only notice when the points are counted at the end that you haven’t blinked or moved your eyes for the last four and a half minutes. And then try again to beat the high score and do a few of the additional tasks, such as doing one of the many easy-to-perform tricks at a trick marker. Not complicated stuff, but tricky because there’s just so much going on and the arenas are going to be really tough on you.

In fact, Rollerdrome is one of the kind that can’t – or shouldn’t – be told all that much more. It’s a game that follows a wonderfully simple design idea that extends to all areas: Few but pleasantly different weapons in their application – the shotgun, for example, wants to be used with timing. In addition, there are a handful of enemy types, each of which has a different purpose and can be easily distinguished from one another, and twelve impressively minimalistic levels that you will want to play over and over again. There really isn’t much more to it, and yet it’s so elegantly solved that you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

And then, of course, it looks fabulous: Fine comic lines outline each silhouette like a French sci-fi cartoon from the 80s. Together with the daring color scheme, the game’s appearance already pleasantly cleans up the basically quite hectic action. A look that not only comes across as distinctive, but also improves playability. Looks a lot like Moebius, what’s happening here and just sounds appropriately driving after many hard swinging dance legs. Even the fonts are beautiful to die for. I’m also happy to forgive that the animations for the tricks and the basic movement pattern come across as a bit stiff.

Rollerdrome test – conclusion:

Rollerdrome naturally has all the style that lesser games tend to try to generate and skillfully injects its “game flow first” attitude into the game mechanics. It’s not the kind of game that will single-handedly revitalize a long-lost sub-genre – I’m not even sure it ever was. But it’s a lovely reminder of how much life familiar concepts can unlock when mixed in the right proportion and prioritized clearly. In addition, it’s fun to follow what little story there is between the individual stages. It’s also not a matter of course in this kind of game. Beautiful little thing that I will remember for a long time.