10.0 hours played
Written 1 day and 16 hours ago
This game is just crazy good. In Rollerdrome, you rollerskate through an arena, armed with a gun, and you have to evade all enemies in your environment, shoot them with your gun, and do tricks to reload. At the end of a level, you get ranked for how many tricks you did, in how fast a succession you killed the enemies, how much time you needed and how much damage you took.
This game has everything: A stunning visual style, really spectacular effects, cool worldbuilding, a fun narrative, crazy good music, an amazing trick system, and cool levels. Controlling the game is absolutely something you can "get good at" - you slowly unravel what the best way to quickly change direction is, when and how to do tricks, how to get up platforms, and so on, and the game puts more and more on your plate as you go along.
Watching someone else play this game is completely overwhelming - lasers try to hit you, the environment is a maze of ramps and half-pipes, and the player does tricks and shoots at enemies at a break-neck speed. And still, playing the game feels incredibly good, and everything becomes rather intuitive rather fast. Additionally, the game offers special challenges for all levels that help you in discovering secrets, and playing the levels in new ways, so playing in an arena is not a one-off thing, but rather a task to master.
One thing I find a bit exhausting is what I would call the "complicated enemy overload" syndrome. The game starts with two rather simple enemy types, and almost every level after this introduces a new enemy that is somehow annoying to kill, until that's basically all you have in the level - a guy that constantly points a fire laser at you and blocks half the arena with his flames, huge robot that takes forever to kill, multiple annoying shield enemies, and my absolute favourite - flying guy you never find who drops huge chunks of acid on you. You actually start to learn how to survive the levels, but each new level is just frustrating to start, because you have to learn so much information about the level before it's really "fun". And if you really don't like re-trying the same level again and again to fulfill hard challenges this just might generally not be your game.
I kinda would have wished for a bit of casual "relief" between the really complicated levels, so that the fact how fun and flawless the controls actually feel would get a bit more time to shine between the very tense arena battles.
But overall, Rollerdrome is just such a good game where everything just really fits together very well. The game is totally worth getting if you like mastering tough challenges!