But aside from that, its focus on the minute-to-minute muckabout is refreshing. Leaderboards are there too, probably with the intention of seeing the most devoted barrel exploders sticking around. Drop in, complete the challenges, set a high score, move on to the next level. So far, I like what I see and I like what I feel. There's the satisfaction of going back to old levels to mop up those challenges you missed, and finding new, better ways to clean up your score: by wall-riding into the arena, by chaining kills into a huge corpse-creating combo, by saving some explosive barrels for just the right moment, and BOOM. Until eventually you are doing both at the same time, which is where the prideful feeling of "damn, that was cool" kicks in.Īdd in a list of challenges that accompanies every arena (kill a house player while nose grinding, perfectly dodge two mines, etc) and you get a game that feels purpose-built to generate five-second gameplay clips of you looking like a roller disco-ing John Wick. It's designed to encourage you to constantly alternate between trigger happy death-dealing and sick backflips. You see, to reload you must perform tricks. A simple trigger pull puts you into a very generous bullet time, letting you hose down incoming rockets or launch a grenade at a distant dork. There are teleporting dweebs with devastating laser beams, riot shielded goobers with deployable mines, spider robots with fast tracking missiles. But the roster of enemy types quickly ramps up as levels unlock. Those laser pointers will turn white in the last second before a sniper shoots, and much of the challenge involves attentive dodging of these bullets. It starts fairly straightforward, just a few ranged enemies to prioritize. These are the "house players", desperate schmucks paid to gun you down before you can set a high score by filling their guts with buckshot. There are snipers who track you with laser sights, for example, and bat-swinging idiots who mostly just stand around waiting for you to come near them.
![danger text vs flowstate danger text vs flowstate](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2-1.png)
They are filled with ramps, quarter pipes, rails, and bad dudes. Arenas are smooth, undulating skate parks with a roller derby polish. So far this delivers smiles and pleased thumbs. Many thousands do not survive.Īs a devotee of the studio's other radical outings in OlliOlli, I already look with an approving nod towards any flow state bloodsport they should care to develop. You must understand how happy an ending this is. It's been fleshed out and flashed up since then, with studio Roll7 slurping up the prototype (and presumably its dev) to create what is now Rollerdrome. This game was first spotted in the wild years ago as a bunch of killer GIFs from an independent developer that made everyone stop scrolling, droop their eyes with with surfer dude reverence, and say: "sweet".