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Rollerdrome’s smooth, bullet time bloodsport is locked and loadedIt’s Tony Hawk meets Max Payne, and it’s rolling out next month

It’s Tony Hawk meets Max Payne, and it’s rolling out next month

A woman in a red jump suit fires guns in midair while falling toward a skate park below in Rollerdrome

Rollerdrome - Official Reveal TrailerWatch on YouTube

Rollerdrome - Official Reveal Trailer

Cover image for YouTube video

A woman in a red jump suit performs a sidewinder while firing backwards at an enemy in Rollerdrome

A woman in a red jump suit performs a skate trick while firing at robots in a red canyon scene in Rollerdome

A woman in a red jump suit fires a gun in midair at a robot sentry in Rollerdrome

A woman in a red jump suit rollerskates over snowy terrain in Rollerdrom

Which is why you need that slow-mo. A simple trigger pull puts you into a very generous bullet time, letting you hose down incoming rockets or launch a grenade at a distant dork. Provided you have the ammo. You see, to reload you must perform tricks. No nose grab, no shotgun shells. It’s designed to encourage you to constantly alternate between trigger happy death-dealing and sick backflips. Until eventually you are doing both at the same time, which is where the prideful feeling of “damn, that was cool” kicks in.

A woman in a red jump suit dodges a blue laser while firing in midair in Rollerdrome

So far, I like what I see and I like what I feel. It has aTony Hawk’s simplicity to it. Drop in, complete the challenges, set a high score, move on to the next level. Leaderboards are there too, probably with the intention of seeing the most devoted barrel exploders sticking around. But aside from that, its focus on the minute-to-minute muckabout is refreshing. It feels like a game that almost could have existed years ago, if the right person in the games industry had been playing THUG all day and then put on a John Woo picture. Kind of a “Why didn’t I think of that?” game.Of courserollerskating with guns would be a blast. Of course!

There are neat story bits between levels too, where you get to walk around locker rooms and media offices in first-person, poking around in your competitor’s belongings, eavesdropping on reporters, and reading the sports pages, which are quickly overtaking the pages of anything else in the news. With these sections you get a sense of a corporatised world outside the arena quickly becoming all about bread and circuses (and even then, not much of the bread).

An office room from Rollerdrome

I have my reservations, of course. I’m less keen on any arena with pitfalls, for example. To leave a quarter pipe you can hold forward to launch out of it, similar to the Tony Hawk games of old. But this means a single over-enthusiastic hold of forward on the thumbstick can see you plummeting helplessly into the void. It’s not a huge deal, you’ll teleport back into the arena with a small hunk of life shaved away. Yet it’s not the health bar I grieve for in these moments, it’s the speed, the flow. You have to quickly learn to be careful of ramps near the edge of these stadiums, and I found this sense of caution got in the way of letting loose in the same way I did for many of the other maps.