This was revealed in a State of Play, to basically no one even realizing it was there.

I saw a few reviews that were quite positive when it came out, so I figured, why not. I know people won’t be talking about this one much at all, whether it’s good or not, so let’s put a bit of a spotlight on it.

Let’s see if it’s good, I had no idea before buying it.

Developer: roll7
Publisher: Private Division
Release date: August 16, 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5 (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Action shooter

Review

There’s not really any story here. In the future there’s a new sport where you go  into an arena wearing skates and you shoot at people who also try to shoot you down. You play as a woman participating in the sport… That’s it! There’s very minor lore bits from newspaper clippings, it’s a big old pile of whatever.

Graphically the game is pretty minimalistic. It uses cel-shading which looks good, the environments are basically skate parks, some on more military-style areas. Enemies are designed to be able to tell even from afar what enemy they are, that way you can easily prioritize targets at a glance. It’s all fairly easy to follow and there’s not much details here. Considering the very simple 3D graphics at play here, performance is gonna be amazing regardless of your PC, pretty much. With my 5800X and 3080, I was getting 1440p ~650fps (sometimes way more). This is gonna run well on the average toaster.

Rollerdrome is a third-person shooter on roller skates. How to more simply describe it would be… what if Vanquish had simpler gameplay, no knee rockets, and Tony Hawk’s trick system. The levels are mostly fairly small and enclosed, covered in ramps, quarter pipes, half pipes, rails and bowls, so you have plenty of stuff to roller skate on.

You only start with one weapon, a set of pistols. I’d recommend playing with a controller, just because playing with a mouse gives no advantage, as aim is largely automatic. As long as your camera is pointed towards an enemy and the enemy is in range of the weapon, you’ll lock on. Some enemies react to your shots, some by generating a shield, some by teleporting. To counteract this at least a little, you possess the ability to slow down time. While time is slowed down, enemies that teleport and create shields take a bit longer to do so, so you can get more hits in (or just get more hits in, in general, since you can still shoot very quickly while time is slowed). Generally you’ll want to slow down time to shoot enemies, it’s just easier that way.

You get more weapons as you progress. The second is a shotgun, which has a timing-based power-up shot when you slow down time, it deals pretty good damage if you hit the correct timing. There’s a grenade launcher, it deals good damage and also hits in a small AOE, but uses up a lot of ammo. And finally there’s a laser gun, which can charge up 2 levels. The second level is very strong, but takes a while.

How ammo works is pretty interesting, because yes, it’s quite limited. The grenade launcher can only be shot twice, then you need to reload. Ammo is actually shared between weapons, so you may elect to shoot one grenade, then finish off an enemy’s remaining health with a half clip of your pistols or 2 shotgun shots. If you’re out of ammo, you’re out of ammo for all weapons. You recover ammo by doing RADICAL tricks. So jumping up on a halfpipe, you can spin, flip and perform various grabs. There’s different grabs you can do if you input different directions first, as well as inputting 2 directions before doing the grab. You can also grind on rails, which works similarly to grabs as far as getting different grinds. Doing tricks recovers your ammo, so you’ll want to be jumping, shooting and doing tricks quite a lot to recover that ammo. You may jump, slow down time, shoot a bit, do a trick, slow time again, then shoot some more, all in one jump if you’re quick enough.

Outside of shooting and tricks, one of the really important aspects of the game is dodging. Namely, you can dodge roll, which happens to be a great way to change directions. Moving regularly is a bit rough at first, you can move forward, and turning. So you can’t just choose a direction to move in, you have to semi-slowly turn, or dodge roll for something a bit faster. Dodging can also be done in the air, but not as a movement option. Enemies like snipers and the laser ones will aim at your, signified by a line between you and them. When that line turns white, they will shoot. If you dodge while it’s white, you get some bonus ammo which is nice, but, more importantly, after a perfect dodge, you can slow down time which puts you in a powered up state. This makes any of your weapons considerably stronger, so enemies that a full clip of pistol bullets might not usually kill, might take just a few.

There’s still some extra things to talk about though. I mostly kinda explained movement, but there’s one thing that took me a second to figure out. If you jump off a half-pipe but are holding forward, instead of jumping up, you’ll jump keep going forward as if it were a ramp. Each level has 10 challenges which gives it a heavy Tony Hawk feel. Those can be things like getting a high score (you get points from kills and tricks, as well as finishing the level fast), doing specific tricks, doing specific tricks at specific spots, killing enemies while doing specific tricks, finding all 5 of the pickups, killing enemies in specific ways (or things like causing a stun on a shielding enemy) and such. It’s pretty fun and gives you a reason to replay levels, alongside trying to get higher on the leaderboard… This is not a game where I was getting fairly high positions on the leaderboard though. Oh, and a fun thing is that, when you unlock a weapon later in the game, you can go back to previous levels and replay with an updated arsenal (and probably an improved understanding on the game’s mechanics). Getting high scores is a matter, mostly, of keeping up a combo. Shooting enemies helps keep the combo alive, but getting kills increases your score multiplier. Getting hit reduces how long you have left before your combo dies, so to get really good scores you have to not get hit, alongside getting your kills in quick. And that means optimizing your tricks since you need to be reloading constantly, alongside avoiding attacks and killing enemies. This is very much a multitask game, and it likes to overload your senses in later levels. It can get REALLY tough to follow at points, especially in the hard mode that you unlock after finishing the game.

Oh, and healing. You heal by killing enemies (specifically they drop green things you can grab, though usually you don’t need to worry about grabbing them since you’re usually close enough to them to just get them). So that gives it this modern DOOM quality, where you die pretty fast, but killing enemies keeps you alive.

Overall

This was a pretty fun game.

There’s a lot to like about the fast-paced, unique gameplay design, and pretty solid difficulty. The momentum-based gameplay, not just as far as movement speed but also just combat pacing, is really interesting, and replaying levels to complete challenges and try to get high scores is fun. I’ve seen people compared it to DOOM 2016 and Eternal, and, while the quality isn’t quite there, the comparison makes some sense. It’s a game that goes through the classic idiom of “easy to learn, hard to master”.

I’d give this an okay recommendation. If you want a nice, tough shooter with unique mechanics, this is definitely one to check.