Once you’ve picked up the absolute basics of control from the opening tutorial, of how to ramp up speed by tucking in as you go downhill, of passing, and the general form of the game, it should quickly become clear how high a ceiling there is for team play and individual skill. You can either hare after the ball-carrier and try to tackle them from behind (likely having to get past or take out a blocker at the same time), or turn around and go for the riskier head-on tackle which requires better timing. The other thing you realise pretty quickly is that there’s two ways to defend.
It’s a real hodgepodge of ideas, but Ubisoft Montreal has been able to pull them together into something coherent and relatively easy to understand. It lifts the general form of roller derby (likely brought to some non-Americans’ attention by a film like Whip It or Rollerball), but then fuses it together with ball games, most easily compared to basketball or… well, Rocket League. The core loop – heh – of Roller Champions is remarkably well thought out and put together. That opportunity came in early 2021 with a public beta test, before the game was shoved back by over a year to its 25th May 2022 release date – hey, that’s tomorrow! I don’t know why the game has taken so long to come together, as simplistic as its core concept is, but game development is hard at the best of times, let alone with an ongoing pandemic to contend with.
It already felt like Ubisoft were a bit late to the future sports game party when the game was revealed at E3 2019, but it was still something that I was looking forward to checking out. It’s surprising how long ago Roller Champions was announced.
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