E3 2019: Everything we know about Roller Champions

At E3 2019, Ubisoft has officially revealed Roller Champions – a new competitive sports game, which actually leaked before the event with a plentiful of early details. During its own show, the French company shared a lot more information regarding the title, which is considered a take on the successful gameplay formula of Rocket League. We shouldn’t criticize Ubisoft for the desire to explore new genres, as the popularity of Psyonix’s project can make literally anyone envious. Funny that Ubisoft hasn’t developed its own Battle Royale yet.

But what do we know about Roller Champions exactly? Here’s some trivia for you. The game is another fast-paced team-based sports title where you need to score goals while rolling skillfully across the arena. Two teams of three players each compete against each other while focusing on cooperation, passing the ball around, and overtaking the opponents. Interestingly, Ubisoft didn’t mention directly gameplay features but rather highlighted the cool mechanics of dynamically growing audience. As the result of your progression, the army of your fans will grow over time, and once you hit a specific level of fame, you’ll be able to perform on bigger arenas that are capable of withstanding increased amounts of viewers.

There’s plenty of gameplay right now on the Internet, and the main reason for it is the recent public demo of Roller Champions. We’ve covered the way you could get access to the demo, so head over to this link while you still have a little bit of time left since the offer ends in a few hours. Speaking of gameplay, it doesn’t look appealing enough right now. Rocket League, being the main source of inspiration for the game and its major competitor, offers players unique opportunities to perform masterful plays, while Roller Champions seems a lot less impressive in that regards. Psyonix’s vehicular football provides you with means to be unique and unpredicted whereas Ubisoft’s game feels overly repetitive and unenthusiastically simple. Just take a look at a full match of the game:

Let’s be honest, it wasn’t exciting at all. There’s a lot lacking in terms of satisfaction when you just hold the ball in your bare hands all the time only to throw it precisely into the hoop of randomly appearing gates. You can’t lead the ball that much easy in Rocket League – and that’s why it appeals so well to the gaming community. You actually need to plan your actions beforehand and react correspondingly to the actions of your foes. In Roller Champions, there’s just pushing and crowding. The core idea behind the game is great enough on its own, but you can’t build a project upon it solely. The current gameplay looks more like a proof-of-concept rather than a wholesome experience, although it’s fairly reasonable – the current state of the game is just pre-alpha.

Obviously, this is not the final quality of the game. From what we’ve seen so far, it’s safe to say that the game has some potential – and there’s room for improvements. Roller Champions needs more exciting moves and tricks for players to perform; it definitely needs some kind of a reward system for perfectly performed overtakes, and the characters themselves should definitely be equipped with cool abilities. To be more enjoyable, the game needs a better-implemented interaction between the players, needs more audio and visual feedback, and there’s an obligatory necessity to add background music and overall more ambient sounds. The characters should be talking more and commenting on the unfolding events.

You don’t have to search for a great example for too long – just take a look at how the voice interactions are made in Apex Legends. That’s the level of immersion, which could make Roller Champions far more entertaining. Ubisoft, time to take notes while we are giving free pieces of advice! The game will release in early 2020, and it is subject to change and to improve a lot. Visually, it’s pretty okay as it is right now. There’s a bit of everything – an obvious similarity towards Rocket League, light traces reminding of Tron, and even an overall strange feeling of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater – while the characters make an impression as if they’ve taken a break from shootouts in Fortnite to spend an hour or two with roller skates.

It’s rather hard to predict whether Roller Champions will be popular among Ubisoft’s fans, but we are pretty sure that Psyonix has nothing to worry about right now. The French company claimed it wanted to create something new – and the result of this intention is Roller Champions. To be honest, there’s literally nothing new about the game, as its core concept has been created back in 1975 with the classic movie “Rollerball” (especially the layout of the arenas reminds of the film) while the gameplay is mostly a rip-off of Rocket League. But hey! With enough efforts put into the production, Roller Champions might actually become a game worthy of your attention.

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