Rocket League: a great game!

This is the "sequel" to the awesome Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars from the PS3 in 2008. SARPBC was the best game that came out that year (I am fully aware that GTA IV came out in 2008). I put "sequel" in quotes, because it's largely the same game with new trimmings. However, that is not an insult. It means that Psyonix know how good their game is, and not to break something that's already gameplay perfection. The addition of new features like easy video streaming from PS4 or Steam makes the game even better than it was.

Briefly, you drive little cars and bump a large ball around an arena, trying to get the ball into the opponent team's goal. This would probably be fun on its own: Rollcage II had a similar mini-game called "Rubble Soccer". But the cars can double jump, and the turbo feature is implemented as a rocket mounted on the back of the car. Since you have full control over the rotation of your car once in the air, you can fly.

Here's a video of me playing a game during the PS4 beta:

A new group of players will work through the game like this:

Everyone drives around, bumping the ball, competing as they might with a normal soccer game played with cars (if that makes any sense). But since the cars are quite a bit shorter than the ball, whenever they hit the ball, it goes into the air a bit. The more enterprising players then start jumping at the ball to get to it sooner than their opponents. Once everyone it doing that, at times when the ball is higher than a car's jump, a few start trying to use the turbo to fly to the ball to gain an advantage.

Soon, players are launching themselves at the ball trying to line up shots on the goal in mid air. Being the goalie now requires flying to block. It is hard (or impossible) to overstate how much fun this is, because you get no assistance from the computer. Everything you get in this game is earned through skill. Lucky shots exist, but you'll find that the only way to perform consistently is to master control of your car.

Over the years, they've tuned the network code a lot, so this version plays better in many ways than its predecessor, even if the gameplay is fundamentally the same.

There are no differences between the myriad cars you see in the screenshots (besides minor differences in collision shapes), so everything comes down to player skill, not choice of car. "Play balance" isn't something we have to worry about here. Of course there are tons of customization options to make your car look the way you want, but these things don't impact the core of the game.

Regarding the price: $20 may seem steep for a "small" game like this with no cinematics or storyline or any of the usual trappings of what we call "AAA games". But I can assure you that if you look at dollars per hour played, you can get much more value out of a title like this because it never gets boring. The only thing I can compare it to is Quake 3, and how long you can spend tuning your skills in that game (I played Q3 Threewave Capture Strike for 8 years almost every day at work, and was still learning how to get better) If support for this is anything like it was for SARPBC, we can expect new arenas which are the main way Psyonix introduces new gameplay.

I have not played the single-player content in Rocket League, so I won't comment on it. But it was top-notch in SARPBC, so I figure it will be good here.