Roller Drome: You Should Play It.

Skate and Destroy

I Was Not Familiar With Your Game

Back when Roller Drome first released, I didn’t think much of it. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with guns is an interesting premise, but the promotional material didn’t make it look too competent. The tricks weren’t anywhere near as cool, it looked floaty, and you couldn’t even wipe out. What’s the point of nailing a sick-nasty nose grind if there’s no risk of grinding my nose against the pavement? The shooting didn’t look too great, either. Enemies sort of stood around waiting for their demise. It even won a BAFTA. No real game has ever won a BAFTA¹. That’s for interactive movies. Me being the elite(ist) gamer that I am, I brushed it off.

Well, today I’m here to set the record straight on Roller Drome: I was wrong. If you’ve heard of the game, but haven’t tried it, then someone’s made a terrible mistake. If you’re reading this, you should try Roller Drome. It takes the simplified tricks and shooting, and merges them seamlessly into an incredibly satisfying core gameplay loop that’s greater than the sum of its parts. It even has a scoring system that pushes you to engage with the game’s mechanics.

You can skip to the game’s Steam page and try it yourself, or you can scroll down and read my ramblings on why you really should play Roller Drome.

Gameplay

Rollerdrome (2023) is a third person action sports shooter. You play as Kara Hasan, a rising star in the deadly art of Roller Drome, the sport that makes roller skating cool by mixing it with fire arms. Each stage puts you in an open arena full of ramps to trick off and enemies to shoot. Complete the objectives, get a high score and, most importantly, try to stay alive. It’s half Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, half Max Payne.

The game has a simplified trick system. There are grinds, but you don’t need to balance. You can do as many flips and spins as you want in the air, and you won’t wipe out, even if you land on your head. There aren’t any fancy connecting moves like reverts, manuals, wall slaps or lip tricks. The tricks are designed to work whenever you need them to, and while that might sound dumbed-down compared to Pro Skater, it has a good reason for it.

The other half of the game is shooting. You have four weapons, each one unlocked as the game progresses, and you’ll use them to take out anyone in the arena that isn’t you. The shooting, like the trick system, is also simplified. There’s a generous lock-on, so if you want to activate someone’s life insurance, all you have to do is put your crosshair in their general cardinal direction, and blast away, assuming you’re in range, of course.

On their own, these two halves of the game are unimpressive, but the real magic comes when they’re working in tandem. The tricks are used for points and style, but their most important role is to reload your weapons. Now, you’re not doing backflips for the love of the game, you’re flipping for bullets. You’ll be gliding across the arena, shooting guys, weaving in tricks to refill and planning the best route to do it, all while dodging lasers and explosives, and it all feels wonderful.

For me, at least. Not too wonderful for the guys getting shot.

Combat

Ay Caramba!

The game’s main objective is to shoot guys. Defeating enemies is what ends the level, and the tricks are in service of the shooting. Even the game’s combo system keeps track of kills instead of how many sick-nasty stunts you’ve pulled off, so I’ll look at the combat first.

There are four guns in Roller Drome: Pistols, shotgun, grenade launcher and a rail gun. They each have their own stats and characteristics. The pistols are long-ranged, fast firing but deal little damage. The shotgun is shorter ranged, but it can stagger enemies. The grenade launcher has very little ammo, but it’s a grenade launcher. It launches grenades. Then there’s the rail gun, which can charge up to fire a long-range laser.

Ammo is shared across all weapons. If you run out of pistol ammo, you’re out of shotgun ammo, and if you do tricks, you fill up all of it. This splits the trick/shoot gameplay loop into distinct chunks of decision making. You see an enemy, decide what gun to use on him, then trick to refill your ammo to then pick the gun for the next enemy. You don’t have to worry about managing individual ammo types. You know that if you do a gnarly 900 tail grab, you’ll land with a full magazine.

Each of the guns is good at defeating specific types of enemies, but it’s not in a color-coded way. There aren’t enemies that are weak only to the shotgun, for example. You won’t be using the blue gun to shoot the blue enemies. It’s more natural than that. There are enemies that put up a shield after taking damage. If you hit them with a grenade, they take a ton of damage, but they won’t die, so they’ll put up a shield to protect their last sliver of health. If you use the pistols on them, you can deal constant damage to them until they die, giving them no chance to put up the shield. The guns also cause enemies to stagger at different rates, with the grenade and shotgun able to stagger in one hit.

The swaggerless Frontside Slide can stagger anyone.

Once you understand how each gun works with each enemy, you’ll see how the decision making plays out. You skate towards a shield guy, you check to see how much ammo you have. You see you don’t have enough pistol ammo to take him down in one go, so you go for the shotgun, to do a good deal of damage, activate his shield, then do some tricks to reload and look for another kill since your combo meter has some time left on it. Maybe use that newly acquired ammo to send a railgun shot straight between the eyes of that annoying sniper on the other corner of the arena.

There’s a bullet time mechanic that helps you blast enemies while speeding past them. It’s tied to a gauge that depletes over time. It’s generous, and it refills quickly when not in use. It slows down time, but lets you fire at regular speed. You can use it to unload an entire magazine into an enemy mid-grind, or to slow down and line up a grenade shot.

If you dodge an enemy’s attack at the last moment, and activate the bullet time, you get super reflex. It’s an enhanced bullet time that adds a lot more damage to your guns. It lets you take out tough enemies in one shot, and it lets the pistols stagger armored enemies. It’s great for killing pesky Pyrobeams with one rail gun shot.

Dodging at the right time counts as a trick. It gives you some points, and more importantly, refills a little of your ammo. Using up a magazine to take down one enemy, then timing a perfect dodge can give you enough extra shots to finish the enemy off. It’s also good for killing enemies in a pinch, to keep your combo going.

The enemies are varied, and act more as decision checks and obstacles than traditional enemies. Most don’t move at all, and they have one specific job in one specific place. They’re like stage hazards. Really persistent, annoying stage hazards with pinpoint accuracy.

There are snipers that lock on to you and fire from wherever they have a clear line of sight on you. There are the melee guys that just sort of stand there waiting for you to skate at them so they can hit you with a bat. The aforementioned shield guys, and some more guys that try to kill you. I won’t list them all individually.

They do a good job at influencing how you play. Since killing them is the main objective, you’ll have to navigate around their attacks and hazards, and know the best way to kill them, and in what order, to have a successful run, keep your combo, and stay alive.

My only complaint with the enemies is with the Pyrobeams. They’re an annoying enemy that runs away whenever it takes damage. They attack by shooting a continuous beam of fire, which tracks. If you dodge, the beam still follows you, leaving fire trails all over the place. They’re annoying as hell on their own, but the game throws a ridiculous amount of them at you near the end. It gets to the point where it starts to feel like a troll level with how many of these they spam.

You let ONE Pyrobeam into your house and suddenly it’s an inferno.

A not so minor complaint is with the auto-aim. It locks on to the nearest target. It works well most of the time, since you’ll line yourself up to shoot one guy. Sometimes it locks on to things like enemy missiles or other projectiles, because they get closer for a few frames, even if you’re steadily streaming lead into someone already. I’ve had moments where I’m blasting down a shield guy, they launch rockets, the targeting switches to the rockets and the guy puts up his shield, all because the game decided I wanted to defend myself. I get it, rockets are scary, and shooting them down is a good idea, but I’d rather eat a missile than drop my combo.

Stages

Shooting my shot at the mall

What you’re doing is important, but so is where you’ll do it.

The stages in the game aren’t bad, but they aren’t great. They’re mostly large, open areas, shaped like a big bowl, with a few ramps in the middle. Some, like the Green Bay Mall, have some verticality to them, but they’re mostly similar.

Enemy patterns are very alike, too. They mostly dot the snipers and pyrobeams around the outside of the map, while throwing in a few of the others beneath them, and some melee guys and the tougher mechs at the center near the end of the round. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this. It’s a good, solid configuration that plays to each enemies’ strengths, but they get a little repetitive after a while.

The stages do a good job of letting you do your own thing. They’re open-ended enough for you to carve your own path. There aren’t many obvious lines, which is good to keep you from feeling railroaded, but at the same time, it lacks that same flow you’d get from a Pro Skater stage².

Each stage gives you ten different goals to complete. There are repeating goals, which are constant throughout each stage; things like getting a high score, collecting combo tokens and doing a specific trick on a trick token. The other goals vary from stage to stage. Things like defeating a specific enemy while doing a specific grind, finishing a level using only the shotgun, or completing a section under a set time.

The goals do a great job of teaching you the game. There are some that ask you to defeat an enemy with a specific weapon. I learned about the pistol’s ability to kill a shield enemy in one go thanks to a goal that asked me to do that exact same thing. They hint at ways you can use your weapons to their greatest effect. I like these.

The problem I have with the goals is that they don’t really make use of the peculiarities of their stage. There’s one goal in the aforementioned Green Bay Mall that asks you to shoot an enemy from the second floor, which lets you know you can get up there, but the other goals don’t have much personality. They’re interchangeable most of the time.

Another strange decision is having goals that are mutually exclusive. One level asks you to shoot an enemy with the grenade launcher, but it also has a goal of finishing the level using only the shotgun. It’s bizarre, and it makes it so you can’t complete some levels’ goals in a single run, which is a neat challenge you can choose to do in the Pro Skater games. It’s a minor nitpick, but it matters to me.

There are rare boss fights. They’re good. Would have liked to see more.

This is in part due to the stages themselves. They don’t have many unique land marks or set pieces to play around with. The ski stages have areas you can fall off from, that’s something. Other than the different color palettes and tile sets, there isn’t much to differentiate them. Sure, you can say that it’s because this is a formal sport, so the stages are arenas, but we’re shooting people with railguns while backflipping. My disbelief has been suspended enough to allow for some wacky stages. Give me something like in Pro Skater 3, where I’m skating in a foundry, jumping over vats of molten metal, and give me goals that interact with said dangerous workplace hazards. Have me committing some OSHA violations.

Decent stages. Not much to them, sadly, which makes them blend together after you play. With a few tweaks we could have gotten a much more memorable set of levels, with more interesting goals. While some of them do a good job of teaching you the game, they could use some more specificity and creativity. I could hand you three goals: Perform a Prowler grind, shoot 5 mines, dodge 2 sniper shots at the last moment before they fire, and ask you if where they’re from, and you wouldn’t even know they’re from different levels.

Conclusion

Roller Drome is a great game. The core gameplay is extremely solid. The two halves of tricking and shooting go together like C4 and an unassuming spark, to create something impressive and entertaining. It has an addictive loop that understands arcade design well, giving you lots of micro-decisions to make at a rapid rate.

The controls are great, very responsive. The simple trick system allows for a lot of error, so you’ll never feel like you’re being held back by it. If you think it, you can do it. It works perfectly fine, most of the time. Sometimes momentum transfer is weird, leaving you with less speed than you thought you had. Another issue I had is that wallrides don’t work like they do in Pro Skater. They don’t give you a magical burst of speed and vertical movement. Here they sort of stick you to the wall at a weird trajectory. Other than that, the game handles well.

The shooting is easy to do, like the tricks, which lets you focus on decision making. There’s enough nuance here with how the guns affect each enemy so the shooting doesn’t get boring. You won’t be going on auto pilot, there’s always a choice to make, of what to shoot next, where to go and how to weave trick into your route to maximize ammo and points.

The combo system is very simple but it keeps you moving. Each kill resets your combo, and you can extend the timer a little by doing damage. This keeps you moving across the arena and planning around your next kill. Trying to maximize each jump for maximum ammo regeneration, and each shot for the quickest kill. It also introduces an element of timing, where you’ll weigh not only who to kill and where, but when, so you can space out kills to get more time to reposition.

An enemy that I think works great with the combo system is the Mecha Brut. It’s a large 4-legged tank with two flamethrowers. Get too close, and it’ll roast you in seconds. It’s a huge, tanky obstacle that blocks off a large portion of the arena. You can take out its flame throwers, and they each count as an enemy. Whenever I see them, I route them in as if they were three enemies, taking out a flamethrower when I need a quick refresh on my combo. It goes from being a huge threat, to +3 to my combo, and a new part of the level to play around.

Ay Dios mio!

Enemy spawns are fixed, so you can plan a route through each level, but there isn’t a clear best way to do things. There’s always an “or” thrown in there to keep things interesting. You can start the level and fight your way through the ground floor killing the melee guys, or you can skate past them and focus on the snipers to circle back to the melee guys, putting you in position to kill the flyers that just spawned in, or you could do x y and z and so on. Sure, there’s always an optimal way to do things, and a “correct” route, but it’s not completely obvious like those pre-solved puzzles modern games like to do.

Even with its sometimes annoying enemies, slightly inconsistent targeting and admittedly uninspired goals, it’s a good, solid time with a fantastic core gameplay loop.

I highly recommend Roller Drome. It is an video game. It has mechanics that work well together, a brilliant core gameplay loop, and some smart concessions on its systems to make them sleek and responsive, letting nothing get in the way of your rampage. It’s also a decent challenge. The later stages can get a bit ridiculous with their enemy placements, but the game itself can keep up with it, which is impressive. There’s even a diabolical new game plus mode that makes the game even harder, for real masochists. I loved playing it, and if you like video games, you will, too.

Will this experience make me less prejudiced towards games? In a way. I’ll keep a more open mind. Whenever I see score-based games, I tend to write them off if they’re not from some obscure Japanese developer. Games like Bulletstorm have taught me that most scoring systems are poorly thought out, so whenever there’s a game claiming to be arcadey, they usually just have arbitrary numbers because videogames. The score requirements are always ridiculously low, too. I’m glad Roller Drome has some spooky score requirements. I like to suffer.

I’ll try to be less judgmental when it comes to games. Except for metroidvanias. Give me a robe and a gavel, I’m judging the hell out of those.

Thanks to Jim Mander for recommending this one. If it wasn’t for the suggestion, I wouldn’t have played this, so don’t make the same mistake I did and get Roller Drome. Not reading his blog is also a mistake. Subscribe if you haven’t.

If you play Roller Drome, you’re already winning.

1. I know “real” games like Mario Galaxy have won BAFTAs.

2. But it’s still got flow, you know it got flow.