Roller drum is similar to roll seven’s other titles in that it’s a single player skating game that emphasizes performing tricks but this isn’t just an olly olly game with guns Volodrome issues the side-scrolling nature of roll 7’s famous platformer series for fully 3d skatepark like arenas as you skate through a single area you must utilize walls and ramps to loop yourself around and to perform tricks populating this arena are enemies that spawn in various locations meaning
That while you’re doing your manuals and flips you also have to take down bat wielding melee fighters and distant snipers who want you dead also differentiating roller drum from olly olly is the fact that the former is not a skateboarding game but rather a roller skating game set in the future as
Imagined through the lens of the 1970s roller drum draws heavily from the sport of roller derby while also taking inspiration from the 1975 james khan movie rollerball which was about a near future bloodsport run by a corporation with nefarious intentions that’s pretty much what’s going on in roller drum too
The focus in roller drum is on the competition which sees your lone skater enter an arena where they have to clear out several waves of house players who have a smart ring of weapons of their own your goal is to clear out all the house players as quickly as you can but
The enemies all have different guns and quirks for how you have to deal with them you start the game with a pair of pistols and slowly unlock more guns through the course of roller drums short campaign up to a total of four all the guns are fairly effective in every
Situation but each one has situational advantages the low damage pistols are good for staggering an enemy or finishing off someone the slow shotgun can fire well-timed slug rounds that do one big hit of damage the grenade launcher can hit multiple enemies but is tough to keep stocked with ammo and the
Railgun can hit enemies from great distances but only if your aim is precise the combat portion of the game is smartly designed to make you feel cool as you make lots of tactical decisions without requiring much in the way of twitch reflexes or intense shooter skills the focus is on maintaining
Momentum and planning your moves through the arena so skating and aiming are both handled automatically you only have to steer and as long as you’re close enough to your phone your bullets will hit them you can also slow down time for a brief period by holding down a shoulder bun
Which allows you a little more precision in your targeting without disrupting the fluidity of your skating much more important is picking the right gun for the job enemies with riot shields are best stunned with the grenade launcher and mopped up with a shotgun for instance while the constant barrage of
Bullets from your pistols can do a lot of damage to teleporting enemies before they have a chance to escape the railgun can quickly take out the jetpacks of airborne enemies before they can get the upper hand on you and the best way to deal with the more fortified foes who
Fire rockets is to shoot their projectile and then follow up with your fastest guns as the game progresses to situations you find yourself in get excitingly hectic you’ll be under assault from big batches of house players who shoot back at you and their aim is just as good as yours
You have a dodge ability that briefly makes you invincible to help keep yourself alive and if you time it correctly it will give you bonus damage on your shots you also gain health from enemies you kill but you have to be close enough to collect it fighting in
Roller drum is all about constant planning where you’re headed next which targets you want to prioritize how to move through the arena to keep yourself alive and which weapons to use for each situation as it comes up it gives roller drum an aggressive cerebral aspect that pairs perfectly with its fast pace
Action you’re a top tier competitor because you’re not only great at skating through the arena but also constantly analyzing it where roller drum really excels is in mixing all these combat ideas with the skating action that roll seven is known for the underlying premise is that each
Arena is something like a tony hawk’s pro skater level and whenever you’re not shooting enemies you’re trying to do sick tricks these two elements of the game can feel at odds with each other why are you stopping to do backflips when people are shooting laser death rays at you but the game brilliantly
Combines its trick-based skating gameplay with its shooter combat you have limited ammo for your weapons and all your guns share the exact same ammo pull so if you go ham with your pistols you won’t have any grenade launcher shells waiting when the magazines are empty the only way to restore your ammo
Is by doing tricks and the cooler the trick the more ammo you’re rewarded with by the roller drum judges the ammo system makes the skating mechanics an essential part of shooting and coupled with other useful additions like the time slowing focus system it never feels like the tricks are an impediment to the
Shooting instead there’s a secret ingredient that helps roll a drum stand apart from other shooters the ammo system adds another wrinkle to the focus on planning in order to keep killing enemies you have to do killer tricks so you’re not only making your way through the arena to take down
Priority targets while dodging incoming fire and keeping yourself alive you’re also sizing up where the ramps are or whether a grind rail will take you past your intended targets or whether you can do a wall ride up to a better vantage point to fire off a grenade it’s an
Intelligent combination of systems that mixes two very different kinds of play together to make a game that works much better than you might think it should doing flips over the heads of enemies slowing down time and blasting them before they can react is awesome every single time quickly dodging a sniper
Round only to follow up with a powerful attack of your own always makes you feel like you have a complete mastery of roller drums arenas and a focus on ever-present momentum gives the game a kineticism that means that action never stops messing up a jump or blowing a grind just means your character
Automatically does a somersault back to their feet to keep moving you never have to stop to think about things that will distract you from the much more engaging problems of how to pull off your next trick or take down your next opponent if there’s a drawback to roller drum
It’s that it naturally hits a skill plateau that’s tough to move past like alioli and tony hawk roller drone puts a big premium on racking up the most points you can and smartly combines the shooting and trick mechanics to make them essential for climbing its online leader boards tricks score you points
But killing enemies creates combos and drives multipliers so you need to be doing both in tandem to really put up numbers trick controls are generally simple and easy to do under pressure grabs are executed by pushing a direction on the control stick with a face button and more elaborate tricks
Take an extra movement swipe or two to pull off the speed needed to execute those tougher tricks results in them not being particularly reliable though so i found i really was able to work in the more involved items of the trictionary especially at the height of intensity in
A match once i started getting good at roller drum i felt like i couldn’t really get much better keeping combos going and killing enemies to raise your multipliers is a huge part of earning a high score but i got a little tired of pulling the same 5 or 10 tricks over and
Over and could never seem to get the tougher ones to activate when i actually wanted them to roller drum also contains an initially engaging first person narrative component that winds up being disappointingly inconsequential you play a new competitor on the roller drum circuit trying to make a name for
Yourself among the stars of the sport matterhorn the corporation behind rolodrome is using the sport’s popularity to consolidate its power lobbying the government to take control of the country’s police forces while protesters push back against its influence rivalries between players political machinations and conspiracies playing in the background are all
Revealed by news reports notes and clues you find in the locations you visit such as the locker room before a match or a tv studio while you await an interview the little tidbits flesh out the world and you even have a few small choices to make along the way unfortunately though
Those choices and the story don’t amount to much other than a little bit of color added to your death match play most of the plot is vague impressions implied by items in the environment like the fact that one competitor is arrested for their ties to an anti-matterhorn
Political group and it all goes about where you’d expect you can make some minor choices about where you might stand on the political situation but those choices don’t seem to affect anything either way you fight to become the new roller drum champion and when you manage to do so you go back to
Competing in tougher versions of roller drums matches in the subsequent season the ideas and presentation of the plot add a lot to the game in an understated way and it’s just tantalizing enough to leave you wishing there was more still roller drum is a blast to play
Especially if you get the hang of its systems and really start to hit the flow state roll seven is trying to achieve revisiting old matches and wiping the floor with house players for 20 or 30 times multipliers is extremely satisfying and doing backflips over enemies while you blast them with a
Shotgun always looks and feels incredibly cool occasionally aspects of roller drum can be a little too simple for their own good but overall the game is a brilliant melding of systems that don’t seem like they should work together but in practice combines excellent elements of skaters and shooters to elevate both [Applause] [Applause] Wow Victory
source
