Rocket League is a mixture of chaos and precision. A smashy crashy ballroom dance that folds carnage and elegance into the same deliciously frosted cake. Rocket League: Sideswipe tries to do the same but in cupcake-sized morsels, and while it doesn’t have the full-frontal, teeth crunching collisions of the original, it’s still an awful lot of fun.
The game takes place in side-on arenas, and sees you trying to score more goals than your opponent in two minute matches. You control your rocket car with a floating joystick, a boost button and a jump button. But there are twists galore.
Yes, the joystick allows you to drive along the floor, but combine it with some boost and you can soar through the air. And yeah, single jumps are nice, but double jumps let you spin and smash the ball as you bounce. It’s a simple set of buttons that lets you perform plenty of complex moves.
And it all works brilliantly. There’s a frantic sway to proceedings, a feeling that you’re always walking a tightrope between hammering the ball into your opponent’s goal and missing completely to set them up for an easy score.
That makes it all the more joyous when you do poke in a goal, or accidentally smack the ball from your own end and watch it saw, majestic and unmolested, into your opponent’s net. Or hoop. There are different modes here.
Perhaps the best thing about Rocket League: Sideswipe, though, is the way you constantly improve. You learn from your mistakes, realising that beneath the madness there’s a physical logic that you can start to exploit if your fingers would just catch up with your brain.
The game is currently running a pre-season, so there’s likely to be changes to the meta in the coming weeks as it moves towards a full launch, but even still, the gameplay foundations of the experience is utterly absorbing.
It might not be the direct port of Rocket League that some were hoping for, but Rocket League: Sideswipe captures and distils what made the home version of the game so great. And in doing so creates one of the finest mobile multiplayer experiences we’ve seen for a while.
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