Rollerdrome between skates and violence | Review
Today, with Rollerdrome, Roll7 tries to reinvent the genre once again videogame of extreme sport, replacing the skateboard with rollerblades, but adding a bit of utopia that is definitely difficult to imagine, but in full line with modern times, that is violence. And not just any violence, but that subordinated to victory, conquest, the thirst to always finish first.
This is Rollerdrome, this is their latest production, which is about to conquer the PC and console market in the over the next few days and that after an in-depth test between preview and review proved to be a product that is certainly interesting, but undermined by a difficult curve that is difficult to understand.
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Il all with the hope of reaching the final and winning a golden palm that can be of incredible moral and physical recognition. The year of setting? 2030. And taking a look at the direction the world has taken, it doesn't seem to be that far from a hypothetical reality.
The truth is that Rollerdrome is a perfect parable of the world we live in: competition, on a purely human level, it is made by the last, who find themselves for obvious reasons having to compete with the same ones of their social class. Of course, in the real world we are not yet at the point of organizing deadly sports, but we are close.
Rollerdrome teaches you to skate
Roll7 is a master of games dedicated to extreme sports. With Rollerdrome, however, everything takes a step forward. The game, while maintaining the idea of being just a video game, is one of the most accurate in terms of attention to technical details. The skill of the development team can be seen immediately, when there are tutorials between one qualification challenge and the next, which teach us some really existing tricks. In this case, the shooting component and the trick component travel in the same track, forcing us to fight for every bullet and every dodge. It will be necessary to learn the wall ride, the nosegrind, the flips and many other techniques in order to survive but also to score points. Points that will inevitably unlock further scenarios and allow us to advance in the game.It doesn't matter if it's a skateboard or simple rollerblades: Rollerdrome does not admit mistakes and asks you at any time to be perfect, and rightly so: the game constantly endangers the life of the athlete we will impersonate, and the only way to survive and close the levels with a satisfying time is to learn by heart any kind of trick that can help us in this goal.
We therefore recommend that you tackle the various tutorials several times and not limit yourself to achieving the minimum goal to overcome them. Learning each technique is essential in order to also understand how to apply it during the gameplay, which is frenetic and adrenaline-pumping, but also slightly confusing.
We could spend hours talking about how we killed enemies in flight using slow motion, but the reality is that even after spending a few hours in the company of Roll7 production, we feel obliged to warn you: we are still beginners who need some time before learning the basics. A classic game, in Rollerdrome, works more or less like this: we are given a series of challenges, which consist of running on walls or landing enemies in certain ways, with a time limit to respect, under penalty of a disadvantage.
And trust me, it will take a long time to get carried away: it goes without saying that we have closed every painting by dying over and over again, or by finding ourselves in front of absurd penalties, resulting in an end-of-level evaluation (another reference to social classes) rather demoralizing. And here is the real problem of Rollerdrome: the difficulty curve is too high, at times even almost frustrating. There will not be few times when you want to give up and brutally close the game. As never before in this case, the title really needs to be your cup of tea.
At the game level, however, everything seems to work very well: with the analog sticks we control the movement of the protagonist and obviously the camera, while the rest of the action is entrusted to the buttons and triggers positioned on the controller. Learn the combos perfectly, their execution time and when to execute them and it will be simple. It will take some time, perhaps too much as we stated above, but the final result will satisfy you in an incredible way, obviously pushing you to fight to enter the world rankings. Another example of an almost inhuman competition, as Roll7's dystopia tells.
Cel shading is art
Unlike other productions, Rollerdrome boasts a style cel shaded graphic. A choice that in our opinion is definitely appreciable. Each play of light, as well as each character and environment, is certainly made in an excellent way. The graphic style reminds us how often it is not necessary to opt for realistic three-dimensional graphics: in certain games, such as that of Roll7, what matters most is the gameplay. In all this, the graphic design helps to give a not indifferent artistic touch and the victory or defeat artworks are among the best we have seen.Technical optimization is also to be rewarded. The game is certainly not heavy, but we have never encountered any bugs or problems whatsoever in the course of the hours spent in his company. Rollerdrome is not a technically demanding game, but its optimization is certainly an example for all those developers who aim to produce smaller games aimed at a niche market. We could not, for obvious reasons, test the performance on consoles, but at least on PC you can rest assured: the title runs perfectly, at 60 frames per second and with incredible fluidity, without serious bugs or major technical errors.
