Rocket League Preview

When I first heard “football with cars”, it didn’t appeal to me. On the face of it, Rocket League shouldn’t appeal to me. I don’t like football and I dislike racing. However, when I heard there were rockets involved, it piqued my interest. Also, it’s by the developer behind Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars. So I signed up for the second round of beta on the PS4 and when I got my code I installed it soon afterwards. It’s rocket-powered cars you can send skywards — surely that can’t be bad!

Matches in Rocket League take place in an arena with equal teams (unless one of your team quits or loses connection…), with a ball in the middle and two goals at either end, and there are four starting positions you are rotated through after each goal within the five minute game. Think five-a-side indoor football, but with fewer players and more rocket-powered jet-cars. The pitch is encased in a solid dome and, due to the high speeds and size of the vehicles (kinda like remote-controlled cars), you can drive on any surface. Sure the grass waves nicely in the breeze, but driving on the walls looks awesome! Not very functional, but visually awesome with the behind-the-car viewpoint.

This was the second time this happened - I missed the first time due to shock.

Your car can jump in any direction and your booster is powerful enough to lift you into the air vertically from a standstill, provided you can aim it at the ground. You have a limited amount of boost, but you can pick up more from receptacles on the pitch. Time it right and you can launch at a ball in midair, using the underside of your car to belt it into the goal! Of course, timing is everything in this game.

The game modes at the moment are all multiplayer, because it’s beta, and go from one-vs-one up to four-vs-four in the newest mode Chaos. I’ll tell you now, that one is my favourite mode. There is also a quite useful tutorial, and a single-player is coming, but obviously not during a multiplayer beta.

You can select which mode it finds matches for, and a helpful feature is how it shows the amount of matches to the specific ones you feel like playing in. You can, of course, just create your own.

You don't have to score most to be MVP!

There seem to be two ways of playing — tactical and offensive. If you’re an offensive player, you bomb around the pitch, launching at the ball whenever you come close and sometimes maybe aim at the goal. Tactical players, however, aid in getting the ball from the other side of the pitch, before positioning themselves facing the goal: the ball goes anywhere near you, you shove it in as quickly and accurately as possible.

I’d like to talk about my experiences with the Chaos mode. My first match after the tutorial was Chaos, and so were the rest of them throughout the next five hours (minus the break I took to watch half an hour of Austin Powers). I would later play the others and find that four-vs-four really does live up to the moniker Chaos — it’s absolute insanity. Eight cars bombing around the pitch and smashing into each other, desperately trying to snatch the ball away from the bumper of the opposition, sometimes exploding… Did I mention the exploding?

Yes, you can straight up explode another car if you hit them just right. It’s one of the fun touches that developer Psyonix have put into the game. There are lots of things to look forward to with Rocket League, even as far as the next beta and especially looking to the summer release. The controls are easy, the matches can be hilarious and it looks pretty great. I’m sure it can only get better when the 10 types of vehicles are available instead of just the single beta one. I just hope it gets voice chat support, instead of just text...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccb71eUsgNw