Rollerdrome Is Like Slapping Roller Skates On Max Payne
Coming off the critical acclaim of skateboarding side-scroller OlliOlli World, you might ask, where could Roll7 go from here? The developer has a solid mastery of «flow state» games that are all about hitting jumps, performing tricks, and chaining sick moves together to log massive scores. What do you bring to that kind of game to create something new?
In the case of Rollerdrome, you make what might be the most video game decision possible: take the mix of skating, tricks, and high scores, and add a bunch of guns.
Rollerdrome trades skateboards for roller skates and side-scrolling courses for 3D arenas, but a lot of the underlying ideas are the same. Levels are full of half-pipes, ramps, and grind rails to give you opportunities to do grabs, flips, and spins. The more tricks you do, the higher your score gets, so the idea is to keep moving and to keep hitting sick moves to earn as many points as you can. It has the same feel as the OlliOlli series, or games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, giving you freeform opportunities to express yourself through mid-air artistry.
The big twist is that you're not alone in the arenas you skate in Rollerdrome--they're filled with enemies called House Players, whose goal is to murder you. Rollerdrome is a blood sport in which your goal in each level is to kill all the House Players before they kill you, and to look awesome doing it. Killing enemies also helps you maximize your score, because as you take out your opposition, you gain multipliers that increase the points you earn from landing tricks.
We played the first six levels of Rollerdrome, and found that once you get a feel for it, the game scratches the same high-score-chasing itch that makes the OlliOlli games great, with a side of
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