Rocket League was first made in 2015 by an independent game developer called Psyonix, and they never looked back from that day. They achieved a lot as an independent game developer, even getting their title sold on Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo consoles. This summer they were purchased by Epic Games, who have taken the steps to bring the game to whole new heights by making the game free to play. Now that the game has become free and over 1 million players have joined, let’s examine what makes this platinum selling title so immaculate.

Gameplay

The name of the game for Rocket League is to outscore your opponent in goals to win the game. Rocket League’s basic rules are that of soccer’s but has one clear difference in the fact that you’re operating a giant car to hit the ball. These matches take place in a giant cage so the space you have to operate the field is limited to two sides for each team and their respective nets. 

Due to the cage design your creativity with the ball will be key due to the limited space. The ball can go anywhere and there are no rules on dribbling, in fact you can run into members of the opposing team causing them to blow up, and get away with it scot-free. However, they will respawn so be careful.

In the world of Rocket League you get to decide how you play, do you want to play like a goalie and prevent your team from being scored on? Or do you want to be the ace scorer who leads your team to victory? The great thing is that you get to choose so have fun picking how you win your games.

Content

The rocket powered phenomenon has a game mode for just about any player, new or old. There are several game modes in the main game’s campaign from just a group of normal games for the casual gamer or an entire ranked system for the more competitive. Outside of playing the main game, there are a myriad of different ways to occupy your time with, there is no shortage of ways to have fun with the game and the best part about it is the freedom the player gets in doing so, you can make up a game that you created and play it using the custom game modes feature. I recommend putting gravity on max, boost on max, and having spikes enabled so you have to juke your friend to score. All and all this game has no shortage of fun and they’re just getting started with new game modes on the way.

Review

I have nothing but great things to say about this classic. The gameplay is tight and diverse. This is my personal favorite game of all-time, and it’s a must have for a PC players gaming repertoire. The gameplay is super fast paced and tight. There’s never any input lag on your controls, so it’s a fluid experience. 

There is a variety of music made by the independent music company Monster track, with custom made songs just for the game. Monstercat has released three total albums for the game, the music is mainly modern pop with a few lo-fi hip hop jams thrown in as well. I’m a huge fan of the genre of music they play and often listen to it while I’m studying. The music also rotates so you won’t hear the same track for hours in the lobby. 

As for in game, the sound really gives a realism to the game, the boost noise is crisp and when accompanied with the various onomatopoeias of the car itself makes you feel like you’re revving the engine. In fact they let you customize the engine noise of your car which is a fun addition to a great gallery of customizable options. 

Another thing that is great about the game is it’s community. There’s a great community of people to play with and if you’re worried about trying to find people to play with or are worried that you can’t play with your friends who own it on other platforms, Rocket League is completely cross platform, so an Xbox player can be in the same lobby with a PC player. 

The graphics are jaw dropping, they went through the trouble of programming grass into the fields just for an added soccer effect, which they didn’t need to do but they knew the little details meant a lot. As for the rest of the games appearance it can be adjusted in your settings to intentionally lower quality if it is causing you lag, so if you have a beast computer you can enjoy the game in this HD or if you still want to play but are getting lag you can play in the weaker quality which still looks pretty solid. 

There are sadly a few problems with the game. For starters the servers for Rocket League have been a point of tension between fans and developers for years due to the age of the servers. The game has not updated it’s server system since 2016 and that was just to expand to the Oceanic servers, so you may experience a lot of lag from their end, in this event you can report the server though and they may get around to looking at it. 

The only other true gripe I have with an otherwise flawless game is the lack of updates to older features. I have faith now with Epic Games these issues will be addressed but there are certain aspects of the title that haven’t been revised since their inception to the game. For example if you want to use the online voice chat to communicate with your teammate or the opposing team to talk some trash, you can’t get anything but some garbled words to go through. Another example of this was the lack of new game modes, the community has made a bunch of fan made modes like beach volleyball that they could have just directly ported to the game and yet they just stick with the same game modes year after year. I do think though that these problems will be addressed in the near future.  

Though it has its flaws, if you want to join a great community, play the game and become a Rocket League junkie you can do so for free now. Just sign into your Epic Games account and search Rocket League in the store, it’s free to download, so sign up. I’ve played this game for five years now and loved every second of it. I’ve made several friends while playing and it’s a great way to hang out with friends, I can’t recommend the game enough.