Roller skating games such as skateboarding and roller skating, with their cool and stylish moves, easily arouse people’s interest. However, although there are excellent representative works such as “Tony Hawk’s Professional Skateboarding”, overly targeted content does indeed raise the threshold for trying.
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I played a skateboarding game for the Doom collaboration, but ended up falling flat on my face
If one merely wants to try something new, then more people might still choose action games that incorporate such elements. For instance, specialized parkour games are relatively rare. Instead, games like “Dying Light” that feature such mechanisms are more popular.
As an independent developer from London, UK, Roll 7 is renowned in the industry for its special fondness for extreme sports themes. Since the release of their representative work “OlliOlli” in early 2013, several series have been launched, and they have accumulated a lot in the design of roller skating games.
Their latest work, “Rollerdrome”, in addition to still retaining the main gameplay of roller sports, its most distinctive feature is the addition of gunfight elements. To put it in the most straightforward and crude way, it’s like in a roller skating competition, both sides of the skaters suddenly start drawing their guns and shooting randomly, performing all kinds of fancy spins while shooting people in the head. For players who love both “Tony Hawk’s Professional Skateboarding” and often play “Max Payne”, it can satisfy their experiences of both games at the same time.
There’s no plot. Good reviews (?)”
All kinds of reality show competitions on TV, due to their program effects that facilitate topic hype and profit efficiency, have always been the darlings of capital since their emergence. Many dystopian works also like to present all kinds of strange reality shows with a critical attitude. Among them, Stephen King’s “Running Man” created in 1982 set many similar plot paradigms for later generations.
Note: Originally named “The Running Man”, it has nothing to do with the idol show “Running Brothers” in the real world.
Schwarzenegger starred in the film of the same name adapted from this novel in 1987. The reality show in the story depicts that after the economic collapse, the United States became a totalitarian police state. The government numbs the public through fraudulent news and all kinds of extravagant TV programs. Among them, the most popular one is “Running Man” – a group of contestants reach the finish line under the pursuit of various traps and armed militants. Whether they win or lose, the audience can enjoy a fatal violent “performance”.
The domestic translation is “Mighty Dragon and Valiant Generals”.
The main source of inspiration for the plot and world view of “Cool Roller Skating” comes from a host of similar-themed films such as “Running Man”. The story takes place in the UK in 2030. With the support of the government, a TV station held the “Cool Extreme Roller Skating Championship” to divert the public’s attention from various social issues. It attracts the public with its unscrupulous and extremely violent and cruel gimmicks.
In the story mode, players take on the role of a cool roller skating rookie – Kara Hassan. While helping her advance through the rankings and win competitions, we would occasionally intersperse some “narrative time” to collect textual materials and gain a deeper understanding of the game’s world view and plot details.
Read the newspaper, listen to the radio or something
However, these links account for a very small proportion in the game. Even when choosing chapters, the system will actively ask you if you want to skip the plot. Although the game features a dystopian theme background, comic rendering and retro-futuristic art style, the core experience provided by the developers remains the gameplay.
To be honest, by the end of the game, I still couldn’t figure out who the villain was or what trouble the British government agency had caused. It is in the arcade-style intuitive process, various skill learning and repeated challenges that I can find the greatest fun of “Cool Extreme Roller Skating”.
A unique system concept
At the beginning, the game will provide you with considerate guidance on various related operations and skills in the form of a competition advancement assessment. Its operation experience is similar to the common third-person roller skating action games on the market, but it is relatively more light-hearted and entertaining, without too many hardcore threshold requirements. One of the most typical features in this regard is that there are no falls in this game.
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It takes only a few minutes to get started quickly
Unlike relatively rigorous specialized sports games, the roller skating experience in “Cool Extreme Roller Skating” is not realistic. The characters have small inertia and long-lasting acceleration power, not to mention that they can roll from all kinds of unimaginable angles. Even if you just move a short distance in place, the character will quickly reach full speed, and the system doesn’t impose many restrictions on when you enter the pre-take-off stage.
But it is also thanks to this principle that the thrill of the roller skating experience in this game has been greatly enhanced. You can operate the protagonist more freely, perform various leaping actions by using the high and low slopes, and easily slide on the track or wall with just one button press. The intention of the production team to reduce all kinds of “logic” is clearly to hope that players will focus on how to perform various fancy moves continuously and smoothly to obtain high score rewards.
Moreover, “Cool Extreme Roller Skating” is not merely about performing stunts in different competition venues; battles also play a very important part of the game. This moderate adjustment can also enable the game to better present the core gameplay of rubbing skate shoes while shooting, without being deterred by overly complicated operations.
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To perform stunts and kill enemies to save lives, if the operation is too hardcore, it will be very discouraging
The game’s shooting experience alone is very rustic, more like the common handling method of third-person action shooting on PS2 when the design formula for shooting on controllers was not yet mature in the early days.
Yes, it’s that kind of mechanism that automatically aims and tracks the target as long as the crosshair roughly hits the frame. This is also deliberately designed in this way to adapt to the fact that the game is constantly in high-speed movement and the scenes are rather chaotic. In addition, pressing the left trigger can enter bullet time. Due to the fast recovery speed of the corresponding energy slot and the ability to further ensure output efficiency, it is used quite frequently.
After jumping to a certain height on the slope, you can perform various fancy stunts by combining the direction of the joystick and one or two buttons. In a competition, if you can perform every single skill well, you can basically achieve a decent score. But stunts are not only used for individual challenges; they also play a crucial role in battles.
In this game, all weapons share one ammunition slot. You can’t reload them by conventional means but need to perform special stunts to restore them. There are not many types of weapons, but they have different functions. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages when dealing with different enemies. Adapting to calmly cutting the gun in a chaotic battle is one of the essential skills to master.
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The reload mechanism can be regarded as a highlight
In the game, avoid it in any state – roll on the ground and spin in the air. In addition to actively showing off skills, perfectly evading the enemy just before hitting can also restore some ammunition. After a successful and perfect dodge, immediately entering bullet time can activate the “Super Reflection” state, significantly increasing attack power while also adding armor-piercing effects to the pistol ammunition.
Through high-pressure environments, unique ammunition recovery methods, and leaderboard challenges, “Cool Extreme Roller Skating” offers an exciting gaming experience. Although the game’s weapons, enemies, level configurations and other variations are not rich, it excels in the combat mechanism that combines with this set of pulley stunts, which is still quite compatible.
The potential is good, but there is still room for improvement
The gameplay of “Cool Extreme Roller Skating” consists of 4 major levels with a total of 10 levels, during which players’ weapons and enemy types will be unlocked step by step. Apart from the feature that the shotgun will fire at the right moment after entering bullet time to achieve a critical hit effect, the design of the firearm is relatively simple. I think the main pleasure of combat still comes from the enemy.
The objective of each level’s mission is to wipe out all the enemies on the field – in the story setting, they are called “home players”, which can be understood as the financial backers who have paid for legal killings (contestants). From the free-riding users with batons to the money-spending bigwigs hiding in walking mechs, the positioning of each enemy is vastly different, and the variables brought about by their presence on the field are also not the same.
The batons can actually be understood as obstacles on the field. Only when you approach them within a certain range will you actively pursue them. Due to their characteristic that they can easily and perfectly evade unless they launch a surprise attack, their positioning is more like encouraging you to use them to safely launch a “super reflex”, which seems useless but is very strategically significant.
Another standard feature of the level is a sniper. It’s the culprit that gets shot every time you come on stage and try to strike cool poses, but you can’t land smoothly. Generally speaking, the positioning configuration when they appear can have a panoramic view of the entire scene, and thus is one of the key factors that keep players in an unsafe state all the time in the game. Depending on the situation, we can either prioritize them to prevent future problems or deliberately keep them temporarily to boost ratings (if you can ensure that every shot is evasive).
As the process unfolds, there will be more men launching tracking missiles, landmine soldiers holding shields or power armor warriors, and so on. Essentially, we can view it as a derivative of the two basic enemies mentioned above – that is, those located at fixed positions on the field, forming a blockade on the player’s movement. And there are always unstable factors that keep players locked and constantly under pressure.
By the time the semi-finals start, you will find that in every game we are being targeted by infrared rays, chased by missiles from behind, and there are always heavy objects falling from the sky. Running around aimlessly will also lead to stepping on landmines. Under such attacks from all directions, what you were thinking about in your mind was how to perform tricks on the monorail with just one leg. It still had its own unique style to play.
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The later scenes were extremely disastrous
However, the restrictions on the field area in the game are rather strange, and it often happens that the game is judged to be out of bounds for no reason. If I fall off a cliff, I can still say that I’m not good at my skills, but there’s a height limit, which is a bit more subtle. In a roller skating race, if I jump too high too fast, you also count it as my foul and deduct my HP as a punishment??
Another issue that can easily lead to elevated blood pressure is the determination of the point of impact. Probably because the auto-aiming function is considered convenient enough, the weapon projectiles of players in this game are actually very small. Although you can shoot at targets from a distance by yourself, it’s almost impossible to hit them. The two heavy weapons aimed manually often miss the target.
Spin, jump, perfect dodge, super reflection, fire howitzer…… at the walking mecha Then it watched the cannonball fly through its legs. I was so angry that I gritted my teeth and left a mark on the handle.
It’s best to add a countdown limit when going out of bounds
Such rough details occasionally force me out of the intense battles in “Cool Extreme Roller Skating”. The game itself is actually quite well-completed, with no bugs and the optimization is also okay. However, these minor issues conflict to some extent with the core experience it aims to provide you with. If the development team could have made timely adjustments, the evaluation would have been better.
This is very important. For an action game with strict challenge items and a global ranking list, only when the details are refined well can it be further determined whether the gameplay design is excellent enough. Moreover, advancing to the levels in this game requires you to achieve various accomplishments in a match, not merely “just pass through”.
However, the game is quite lenient in one aspect, allowing players to freely set and adjust the difficulty (official cheating). You can turn off the ammunition limit, reduce the enemy’s attack power, or cancel the promotion requirement rule, and achievements can all be unlocked normally. The only price to pay is the inability to upload the ranking results. For players who are still practicing in the learning stage or don’t care about rankings, they can play more freely and unrestrainedly.
Even the speed can be adjusted if necessary
After clearing the game, the “Fight for Blood” mode will be unlocked in the form of a post-story of the main story’s ending. It can be regarded as a highly challenging level, with obvious differences in enemy configuration, punishment mechanism and challenge items, fully demonstrating the cruel side of the game.
This is probably also the project positioning of Roll 7 for “Cool Extreme Roller Skating” – taking you to experience the thrill of roller skating at a relatively comfortable and balanced pace, and then gradually bringing the more challenging and hardcore core to the table. And when you have gradually grasped the gameplay but find that your report card is filled with rows of “D” ratings, you may not be so willing to give up.