Rollerdrome - Review
Volodrome issues the side-scrolling nature of roll 7's famous platformer series is traded for fully 3D skatepark-like arenas. As you skate through a single area, you must utilize walls and ramps to loop yourself around and to perform tricks. Populating this arena are enemies that spawn in various locations, meaning that while you're doing your manuals and flips, you also have to take down bat-wielding melee fighters and distant snipers who want you dead.
Roller Drum and Olly is the fact that the former is not a skateboarding game but rather a roller skating game set in the future as imagined through the lens of the 1970s. Roller Drum draws heavily from the sport of roller derby while also taking inspiration from the 1975, james khan movie rollerball which was about a near future bloodsport run by a corporation with nefarious intentions.
That's pretty much what's going on in Roller Drum too. The focus in Roller Drum is on the competition, which sees your lone skater enter an arena where they have to clear out several waves of house players, who have a smart ring of weapons of their own. Your goal is to clear out all the house players as quickly as possible, but the enemies all have different guns and quirks for how you have to deal with them.
You start the game with a pair of pistols and slowly unlock more guns through the course of the short campaign, up to a total of four. All the guns are fairly effective in every situation, but each one has situational advantages. The low damage pistols are good for staggering an enemy or finishing off someone.
The slow shotgun can fire well-timed slug rounds that do one big hit of damage. The grenade launcher can hit multiple enemies, but it is tough to keep stocked with ammo, and the railgun can hit enemies from great distances, but only if your aim is precise. The combat portion of the game is smartly designed to make you feel cool as you make lots of tactical decisions without requiring much in the way of twitch reflexes or intense shooter skills.
The focus is on maintaining momentum and planning your moves through the arena, so skating and aiming are both handled automatically. You only have to steer, and as long as you're close enough to your phone, your bullets will hit them. You can also slow down time for a brief period by holding down a shoulder bun, which allows you a little more precision in your targeting without disrupting the fluidity of your skating.
Much more important is picking the right gun for the job. Enemies with riot shields are best stunned with the grenade launcher and mopped up with a shotgun, for instance, while the constant barrage of bullets from your pistols can do a lot of damage to teleporting enemies before they have a chance to escape, the railgun can quickly take out the jetpacks of airborne enemies before they can get the upper hand on you, and the best way to deal with the more fortified foes who fire rockets is to shoot their projectiles, and then follow up with your fastest guns.
As the game progresses to situations you find yourself in getting excitingly hectic, you'll be under assault from big batches of house players who shoot back at you, and their aim is just as good as yours. You have a dodge ability that briefly makes you invincible, to help keep yourself alive, and if you time it correctly, it will give you bonus damage on your shots.
You also gain health from enemies you kill, but you have to be close enough to collect it. Fighting in Roller Drum is all about constant planning: where you're headed next, which targets you want to prioritize, how to move through the arena to keep yourself alive, and which weapons to use for each situation as it comes up.
It gives Roller Drum an aggressive cerebral aspect that pairs perfectly with its fast-paced action. You're a top-tier competitor because you're not only great at skating through the arena but also constantly analyzing it. Where Roller Drum really excels is in mixing all these combat ideas with the skating action that Roll Seven is known for.
The underlying premise is that each arena is something like a Tony Hawk's pro skater level, and whenever you're not shooting enemies, you're trying to do sick tricks. These two elements of the game can feel at odds with each other. Why are you stopping to do backflips when people are shooting laser death rays at you?
But the game brilliantly combines its trick-based skating gameplay with its shooter combat. You have limited ammo for your weapons, and all your guns share the exact same ammo pull, so if you go ham with your pistols, you won't have any grenade launcher shells waiting when the magazines. The only way to restore it is by doing tricks, and the cooler the trick, the more ammo you're rewarded with by the roller drum judges.
The ammo system makes the skating mechanics an essential part of shooting, and coupled with other useful additions like the time-slowed focus system, it never feels like the tricks are an impediment to the shooting. Instead, there's a secret ingredient that helps roll a drum set apart from other shooters.
The ammo system adds another wrinkle to the focus on planning. In order to keep killing enemies, you have to do killer tricks, so you're not only making your way through the arena to take down priority targets while dodging incoming fire and keeping yourself alive, you're also sizing up where the ramps are, or whether a grind rail will take you past your intended targets, or whether you can do a wall ride up to a better vantage point to fire off a grenade.
It's an intelligent combination of systems that mixes two very different kinds of play together to make a game that works much better than you might think it should. Doing so flips over the heads of enemies, slowing down time and blasting them before they can react. It is awesome. Every single time you quickly dodge a sniper round only to follow up with a powerful attack of your own, it always makes you feel like you have a complete mastery of roller drums arenas and a focus on ever-present momentum.
This gives the game kineticism. That means that action never stops. Messing up a jump or blowing a grind just means your character automatically does a somersault back to their feet to keep moving. You never have to stop to think about things that will distract you from the much more engaging problems of how to pull off your next trick or take down your next opponent.
If there's a drawback to Roller Drum, it's that it naturally hits a skill plateau that's tough to move past, like alioli and tony hawk, roller drone puts a big premium on racking up the most points you can and smartly combines the shooting and trick mechanics to make them essential for climbing. On its online leader boards, tricks score you points, but killing enemies creates combos and drives multipliers.
