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.

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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.

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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 incentivised to constantly keep moving and performing more tubular actions, which makes the shooting feel like part of the movement and vice versa, rather than two separate mechanics in one.

At first, you’ll likely just empty a clip into an enemy and then skate off to do a few basic 180s, letting the combo counter run out as you take your time, but as you get more familiar with how Rollerdrome plays, you’ll be shooting in slow motion while twisting out like Mike McGill with a combo counter in the double digits, all without breaking a sweat.

It’s not quite as simple as being a skating killing machine, however, at least not when you start out. Each arena is also full of enemies trying to become the champ themselves, all with their own special tactics that you need to keep in mind and work around. The simple goons will only hit you if you’re close, so they’re easy to deal with, but soon they’re joined by enemies with rocket launchers, snipers, jetpacks, and even mech suits, all on the field at the same time and all trying to kill you.

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Thankfully, similarly to Doom Eternal, each of them is weak to certain weapon types and strategies. Kara starts with a dual pair of pistols a la Lara Croft, but as you progress you’ll unlock a shotgun, a grenade launcher, and a charged crossbow. The multiple enemy types having different weaknesses makes Rollerdrome feel a little like a puzzle game at times, asking you to swap between guns on the fly to deal with whatever’s in front of you, all while also maintaining your combo counter and ammo by looking cool. There’s nothing quite like it.

Much like OlliOlli World before it, your mileage with Rollerdrome is going to depend on how willing you are to replay missions to slowly better your old score. There are a total of 16 missions, most of which can be completed in around ten minutes or so the first time around, which means that playing through once is really no longer than three hours.

To get the most out of Rollerdrome, you need to go back to levels to try and get a bigger combo counter going, get a better overall time, and complete all of the optional challenges. There’s no reason to do this beyond your own sense of accomplishment, but if that’s enough motivation for you I guarantee you can sink days into this game. I wish there was a bit more meat on Rollerdrome’s bones so that it didn’t have to rely so much on replayability, but the short length of the levels work to make the game feel perfectly focused.

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If polishing your own scores isn’t enough for you, the biggest bit of replay value that Rollerdrome offers is the Out For Blood game mode that unlocks after completing the main story. Although it again has you going through the same 16 missions, it remixes the levels to have all of the hardest enemies in from the start, stretching everything you’ve learnt and acting as the final test. It’s some seriously challenging stuff that requires you to have mastered the mechanics, but for those invested in how Rollerdrome plays, it quickly becomes the best way to play.

I’m not quite sure when it was decided that 2022 was the year of rollerskating, but it’s clear that it already has a champion in Rollerdrome. Although it may be short, its masterful movement and shooting are a shotgun blast to the face - and I mean that in the best way possible.

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Rollerdrome is available on PS4, PS5, and PC. We tested the PC version for this review. Review code was provided by the publisher.

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