Roller Drome

[DANGERMAN]

Roller Drome seemed to get talked about a lot right before release, then no one mentioned it again. It's a CEL shaded roller skate arena game with similar muted colours to Sable. Presumably deliberately it reminds me of old 70s genre films.

 

The concept is kind of Running Man, you enter arenas and have to shoot the house players. To reload you have to do tricks, this refills your ammo, killing enemies gets you health back,and there's a bunch of different enemy types.

 

I wasn't feeling this originally, it just felt flat and boring, frustrating even. Movement can be a bit odd, you don't control your momentum, press forward to start then leave it, concentrate on steering, jumping and tricks. Get close enough and there's an auto aim to shots, with some of the weapons having slight tricks to them. There's a dodge, time this with the slow down time mechanic, usually used for aiming, and you get an extended period of slowed time.

 

There's challenges to the levels, things like performing certain tricks, kill enemies with certain weapons, and I think it's this stuff that was annoying me. It's probably best to just beat a level then revisit it and try to get one or two challenges each time, that's not how I was approaching it. You need to beat a certain number of challenges to unlock the next set of levels, so I was trying to beat everything all at once, you just don't have that sort of control early on, or I didn't, I did much better when I came back after a break and went back to the earlier levels.

 

I'm still not sure I see the really high scores for it, but when it does all click with you it is fun, really fun at points