If I asked you to play a video game and told you that it was
car soccer, you’d say I was dumb and there was no way you’d spend good money on
it. You might think, “This couldn’t possibly work, car soccer is stupid, stop
texting me stupid things.” Well you, sir, are a jerk, because car soccer is one
of the biggest sports games ever now and it’s also one of the best.
There’s not much to Rocket League. You pick a car, join a
5-minute game, and try to score the ball in the other person’s net by hitting
it with your car (duh!). You can rocket yourself into the air with boosts, flip
your car around, and there’s a few specialty modes which give you powers, turn
the game into basketball or hockey with cars, or force you to prevent the ball
from falling onto your side of the field entirely. There are ranked and
unranked matches, and each finished match gives you some stuff to equip on your
car. That’s… well, that’s pretty much it.
As far as a multiplayer game goes, this one can be
frustrating to no end. Unless you actively pair up with people, it’s all luck
whether you get a solid, crafty partner or someone who keeps sabotaging your
efforts. I’m more antisocial with these types of games than most, so playing
with random people often gets on my nerves, especially when the opposition
scores a goal and my partner just quits. Playing ranked matches is almost a
lesson in frustration, since no matter how well you might play, you can’t
control anything else your partner does. Unranked mode isn’t bad, and it’s great
just to sit down and learn the game without any concrete result, but they’ve
recently taken away from of the unranked features, like all the specialty
modes, making it kind of dull. People also like to talk shit (yes, guilty), but
every online game is filled with trolls, and Rocket League is probably pretty
tame compared with others. If anything, it leans toward sarcasm,
since you have insta-chat buttons that let you type “What a save!” every time
your partner makes a garbage play and lets in a goal (seriously, what were they
thinking? The gall to NOT EVEN TOUCH THE BALL ON A SLOW PLAY COMING AT THE NET,
GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME DO IT, OKAY ASSHOLE?! HOW DID YOU EVER
MAKE IT TO PLATINUM ANYWAY???).
With that said, the frustration is more than worth it
because of the unique gameplay. The designers realized that car soccer
need not be a realistic venture and decided to make the cars jumpy and drive
flexibly. Everything happens within a second or two, so that you’re never out
of a match, even if you’re down by a few goals with a minute left to play.
There’s so much style to hopping into the air and directing the ball into the
goal that nothing is ever the same from one match to another. It’s a bit
stressful but requires both skill and knowledge of how the game rolls, making
it a kind of chess-on-wheels. It’s also played in three dimensions, which
separates it from any other sports game that’s based mostly on 2D movement,
like the NHL or NBA games, or even just regular racing games.
I don’t know what the price of Rocket League is anymore
since I bought it for a measly $20 on both PS4 and Xbox One about a year ago.
Whatever the price is, it’s worth it for the repeatability and the content
that’s always being added. I haven’t ever been able to just sit down and play a
game so nonchalantly in my entire life, where you can jump in and out of
matches as you wish, vegging out on the couch after a long day of work and
playing with the kids. It’s like a couch for my brain, where I can let it
slowly unwind and eat junk food at the same time. For one of the cheapest games
I’ve ever purchased, you can’t ask for much more.
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