Rocket League is a simple game, and I am going to dedicate more words to it than are necessary just so I can describe why it is so good. The sum of the games parts – its excellent controls, its straight-forward objective, its aesthetic or the appeal of its physics – equal something more substantial. Rocket League is distilled fun, mixed into a cocktail of adrenaline and glee. It is the kind of game that everyone’s inner child will enjoy, whether they care about it as a sport or just want a sports video game like they used to make them before the genre was limited to true-to-life simulators.
There’s no story or plot. Rocket League doesn’t need either of those things. It is a game where you play as a toy car in a closed off arena and you play soccer with an over-sized ball and some exaggerated physics. Oh, did I mention these are rocket-powered cars capable of doing insane aerial maneuvers as they double jump and blast off? Well, it has that too. Plus, you can customize your car with decals, colors, flags, and hats. Yes, hats.
On paper, it sounds silly, but I was ready to throw money at the game when I saw the trailer for the first time. I had never heard of Rocket League’s predecessor, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars. Probably because no one I know has the lung capacity to say such a mouthful in one go. Seeing Rocket League for the first time had my adrenaline pumping, and I wasn’t even hurling my car at incredible speeds toward my opponent’s goal yet.
When the chance to get into the game’s closed beta on Playstation 4 arose, I double jumped like I was trying head a ball into a goal with the frontend of my car. I got in too. I was worried about the game’s simplicity and whether its controls would be too hard to pull off. Playing Rocket League made all my worries melt away. The controls were easy to learn, hard to master, and everything fell into place behind them. By modern standards, the game’s only lack was in presentation, but none of that mattered when I was driving like a mad man trying to push a giant ball around (or my opponents).
There was never a doubt after trying it that I would be buying Rocket League.
It’s a bit late in the game to review Rocket League. It has already taken the Internet by storm and sold over 5 million copies. Antics in the game get covered almost daily by nearly every major news site. Plus, as you can imagine, my ability to be objective about the game is approximately the same as my ability to pull off aerial headers in-game. It doesn’t exist.
I want to discuss Rocket League for what is subjectively is, because I imagine many will share my opinion. For far too long, there’s been a gap between gamers who like sports and those who don’t. That gap was once filled with games that appealed to both audiences, though those kinds of games are harder and harder to find now. I don’t like basketball in the slightest, but I will play anyone in a game of NBA Jam. The same goes for football and NFL Blitz, or any sports-based Mario game. Even the more authentic takes on a given sport were once more accessible to a broader array of gamers once. I’ve purchased Maddens and NBA 2K’s before; I even remember convincing friends to play me in MVP Baseball when they weren’t baseball fans. While I am still open to the idea of playing NBA 2K or FIFA with friends, I don’t regularly purchase titles in either series, and I would be at a loss for the game’s controls or mechanics, in addition to being all familiar with either sport. Rocket League doesn’t have that problem; it takes the skeleton of a sport and then straps on a fun-fueled rocket that’ll take you straight to happy town.
Or maybe that is hyperbole or a manifestation of my ignorance. Maybe sports games never stopped being fun, but non-sports gamers have developed their own alternatives – MOBAs, Counter-Strike, or any multiplayer game where the community debates the meta rather than the awesomeness of a particular ability or power-up. We’ve leveled up past needing sports games to get our team-based kicks on. While we once may have played Quake or Halo or Age of Empires for the fun of it in addition to the competition, there are so many multiplayer titles we play these days for the competition aspects first, the fun sometimes be damned.
The problem with sports videogames for non-fans is that success is far more important than just playing. In a shooter, the gameplay mechanics are fun in and of themselves. In a fighter, there’s no way to run up the score. With sports games, you can lose by an infinite number of points, and the only thing you have to show for yourself by continuing the struggle is a bunch of meager strategic decisions followed by brief sets of inputs, all of which only dig your own grave deeper.
Rocket League manages to take the essence of sports games, the team-based and score-oriented design, and brings it back down to a simplicity that everyone can appreciate. Introducing Rocket League to a friend, no matter their interest in being competitive in gaming or sports, is the same as introducing them to Mario Kart for the first time. It’s a game anyone can pick up and get lost in. Yes, winning feels good and you want to succeed, but losing isn’t so bad either. There game rewards you for completing games more than it does for winning them, plus they are short and sweet. There are already players so unbelievably good at this game that the other 99% of us will never be on their level, but who cares? It’s a game where cars bump into a ball until sirens go off and the arena explodes.
And it remains exciting every time it happens.
