One of my favourite games of all time is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. There’s nothing quite like skating around trying to keep a combo counter as high as possible, pushing yourself to keep doing more advanced tricks and never stop moving, ticking off challenges and watching the clock tick down as you pray for more time to beat the top score. It’s a strange mix of zen-like concentration while also making your palms sweat and your teeth grind. It’s perfect.
It’s a vibe I didn’t think I’d see again thanks to the continued fuckery of Activision Blizzard, but Roll7 has managed to almost perfectly capture it with Rollerdrome, swapping out the realism and punk for cel-shading and techno, all while adding the one thing that Tony Hawk’s was missing - murder. Lots and lots of murder.
Related: It's So Annoying That Pokemon Scarlet's Koraidon Is Not A Bike
Rollerdrome stars Kara Hassan, a newcomer to the titular bloodsport that’s all the rage in the future. Sadly, despite an interesting setup, Rollerdrome doesn’t really do much with its narrative, hiding it in first-person sections between levels that have you walking around the environment interacting with notes on the wall and random objects. It’s a dull way of telling a story to begin with and Rollerdrome does nothing to rectify that.
Thankfully, everything else about Rollerdrome is so damn good that it doesn’t really matter. In case you couldn’t tell, the basic gameplay loop is extremely similar to THPS, although instead of performing tricks to stick it to the proverbial man, you’re doing them so that you can keep your guns loaded to stylishly murder everyone in sight. Each trick that you perform gives you some ammo and more advanced tricks give you extra bullets, so you’re
Read more on thegamer.com