How hard is Rollerdrome? If you’re thinking of trying out the game for the first time, you might be wondering quite how much of a challenge you’re in for, especially if you’ve seen the explosive trailers full of fearsome-looking foes and back-flipping skateboarders.
In our experience, Rollerdrome starts off easy and gradually gets more difficult, but most players should be able to complete it with a bit of perseverance. If you fall off the map at any point, the game loads you back in. But if your health bar drops to zero, you’ll have to restart that particular match from the beginning.
If you find yourself losing repeatedly, it’s worth remembering that Rollerdrome does have a wide array of ‘assist’ options. These basically allow you to make your own easy mode. Head to the settings menu, find the assist-related section and you’ll see that you can give your character unlimited life and ammo (as well as making reflexes less important).
Turning on assists in Rollerdrome will not halt your progression through the campaign, but using these helpful options will stop your scores from appearing on the leaderboard. When we spoke to the developers prior to the game’s launch, they explained why these options are in the game.
David Jenkins, Head of Quality Assurance at Rollerdrome developers Roll7, gave us a lot of insight into the thinking behind these optional assists.
Jenkins explained: “For me, playing games when I was younger, I wasn’t particularly good at some of them. I found that I enjoyed the game much more, and I could learn much more about the game, experience more of the game, get better at the game, with those sorts of assists on. They allow you to sort of free your mind a little bit, to kind of focus on individual bits and then go, ‘OK, right. I think I’ve got this now. I’ve got this. I can do this.’”
Baking these assists in Rollerdrome, Jenkins said, “means that if you’re struggling with it, you can still experience the whole game, start to finish, without that sort of blocker, basically, that makes you kind of go, ‘OK, well I played this game for an hour, and that’s all I’ve got, I can’t do anymore. I give up’”.
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He continued: “Because we’ve made the whole game, right? We didn’t just make an hour of a game, we made the whole thing, we want everyone to play the whole thing if they can. So yeah, the assists were a very sort of conscious effort to try and ensure that as many people as possible can play as much of the game as possible, and enjoy as much of the game as possible.
“And hopefully, as I said, [players can] learn from those experiences and then use things like the god mode to learn those lines to the level without, you know, only getting two thirds of the way through every time and then getting blown up by something or set on fire or whatever.
“So yeah, personally I’m a big fan of that sort of thing in games in general. I think a good part of the game’s fun is the challenge, but there’s a law of diminishing returns on that where it becomes too challenging and then it’s not fun at all. And these sorts of things allow people to adjust that challenge level to whatever suits them.”
Rollerdrome launches on 16th August for PC, PS4 and PS5. You’ll find the game on Steam and PlayStation Store.
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