When a game with good team play really works, it’s wonderful. Your squad is communicating over voice chat, discussing strategies, what moves to perform next, complaining about members of the opposing team, maybe even a bit of lighthearted trash talk. A good team game is essentially a social experience, and just as with social games like Mario Party, sometimes the experience of playing with other people is more important than the game itself. That’s almost certainly the case with Roller Champions, but don’t write it off yet.
Most of us have at some point adored Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and spent hours speeding down ramps and catching air. Roller Champions takes the act of sliding around a big arena and fuses it with fast-paced contact sports. The primary game mode has you racing around Baby Park-style arena with two long straights and two tight turns on each side. You race around this arena while carrying a ball. You need to make a lap of the arena without the other team touching the ball in order to open the goal, at which point you aim and throw the ball in to score points. If you race around the track several times before shooting for the goal, you can get even more points. Games are won by getting five points, and you can absolutely do that with a single shot at the goal.
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Of course, the enemy team has to stop you. This is a contact sport, which means other skaters can just slam right into your character, knocking you down, slowing your momentum, and causing you to drop the ball in the process. If the enemy team grabs the ball after that, the goal will close and your lap score is over, unable to be cashed in. If you’re going against an aggressive team, you don’t want to spend extra time on laps when it’s difficult to get points in the first place.
You can counter those aggressive teams with smart team play. Enemies often focus on whoever has the ball, for obvious reasons, but this leaves your team wide open for a pass. It is possible for the enemy team to intercept a pass, but fairly difficult, meaning smart passes around your team can circumvent most of the issues you have dealing with foes. As the skill of your opponents increases, the importance of passing and playing with your allies rises too.
While you won’t be pulling stunts and tricks to rack up combos in Roller Champions, the skating feels smooth. You’ll mostly be holding forward to build up speed, and holding the right trigger while going down slopes and ramps to make the most of the momentum. While in a match you can also tap the left shoulder button when behind an ally to grab them and use them to launch yourself, offering a huge burst of speed. This is ideal to quickly get ahead so allies can pass you the ball. Luckily it doesn’t matter which way you go around the track in Roller Champions, so you can feel free to turn around and take your foes head-on. Your main challenge while skating will be evading or tackling enemies while maintaining your speed as much as possible.
The gameplay loop is easy to learn but will be very tough to master. You can dodge tackles coming your way with smart movement and jump to better evade foes or intercept passes, but these are the kinds of tactics that’ll become useful after hours of play, not in your first few games. Just as with other F2P competitive games, like Rocket League, this will be an easy game for your friends to pick up, but difficult for them to truly excel at.
You can play this main game mode in either Quick or Ranked modes, but if you want to take a step away from all of the action you can enjoy the Skatepark, which acts as a social hub, take part in Limited Time Game Modes which will change regularly, or even create a Custom Match to enjoy with friends. It’s fairly slim pickings in truth, but it’s early days and the game is F2P, with four seasons of content planned for the first year, so we can expect a lot more to come in the near future.
If you want a sense of progression, then that comes down to your created character. When you start out, character creation options are incredibly sparse, with only a handful of body types, and a single hairstyle: bald. Not that that’s a bad thing. You will unlock loot boxes and more cosmetics as you play games, level up, and earn fans, with the ultimate goal being to create the coolest-looking character possible, complete with emotes to celebrate your victories.
While Roller Champions doesn’t have a lot to offer in these early days, it does offer some good fun for a team of three friends jumping online together, complete with voice chat, ready to wreck some noobs. If you’re going in solo, you won’t find it quite as exciting. As long as you can convince a couple of friends to download the game and spend the night playing with you, Roller Champions is well worth investing your time in with pals.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
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