Rocket League is a physics-based sports game loosely based on soccer. You play as a rocket-powered car, and your goal is to bounce an oversized ball off of your vehicle into the goal on the other end of the field. The standard setup is 3v3, but you can play with teams of any size from 1 to 4.
The game is very simplistic. The controls are fairly basic, but are at times frustrating. Your car can drive forward or in reverse, skid to help you rapidly change direction, give you a rocket boost, or jump (and double jump). The jumping is the most complicated part of the game; if you jump and use your rocket boost, you can fly through the air for brief periods of time. You can also shoot through the air with a sort of rolling rocket boost instead of jumping/double jumping, which takes your car on a much lower arc.
The controls are tight in their own way, but also frustrating; there are very few commands, but the jump and the “throw your car through the air” commands use the same button ,with the only difference being directional controls. This is a bit frustrating at times, as you want to double jump or boost and get the other thing. It is something you have to get used to, but it feels strange that you have to at all, because there are so few buttons actually being used.
Likewise, flying through the air on a rocket is extremely awkwardly executed. It takes a lot of practice to do so reliably, and the controls are very sensitive, making it easy to spin out or end up somewhere you didn’t want to go.
The overall physics of it are decent enough; it is generally fairly predictable where the ball will go, but oftentimes, multiple cars will collide with the ball at the same time, making its trajectory much less predictable.
There is both a single player mode and a multiplayer mode to the game; the single player mode takes the player through a season of games with NPC teammates, while the online multiplayer mode has both ranked and unranked modes at multiple team sizes. The ranking system works pretty well, and I was mostly being matched up with reasonably skilled players close to my own level, though it seemed to overestimate my skill rather than underestimate it, so I was usually one of the weaker players; I did not once win the MVP award when I played online.
The games are also quite short, clocking in at five minutes each, though the replays on all the goals make them last longer, especially in single player, where sometimes the weaker AI levels will allow you to rack up 20+ points in a game.
All in all, the game is a decent sports game, albeit with somewhat questionable controls.
So why the lack of a recommendation?
Honestly, while the game was fun for a while, by the time I’d played it for a day or so I was already more or less done with it. It wasn’t that it was bad, it was that, like many such games, it was pretty repetitive. But the game itself felt very simplistic.
If you aren’t a sports game fan, you’re likely to get bored with this game fairly quickly. If you don’t have a high tolerance for repetition, you also won’t really care for this game very much.
If you do like the sort of repetitive, iterative competition, and don’t mind a bit of chaos in a game, this may well be something you enjoy. But personally, I got all that I wanted to out of the free weekend, and I can’t really see wanting to buy it to play it more.
2.5