Imagine buying a game and only playing it for a couple of hours before giving it the cold shoulder, only to reinstall it after it gets free to play for everyone. Such is the tale of Rocket League for me. Fast-paced and fun for casual and sweaty gamers alike, Rocket League (RL) is my fascination for football and cars combined into one small package.
You’d think that this concept is too far-fetched and only appeals to a specific niche, well you’re right. Based on almost a hundred hours of gameplay, I’ve chatted with people who were just starting to the ones I met on my competitive matches, (Platinum and Diamond) asking them about their RL experience. Their answers don’t follow a clear pattern, but are mostly at the extreme ends like “I love RL” or “I hate RL”. Simple answers make my job easier, after all.
Gameplay
Calling gameplay a game’s biggest asset is something rare to see these days. With developers pushing all the buttons to make their games look aesthetically pretty, it comes with a cost in terms of actual playability.
If you haven’t played Rocket League yet, expect yourself to be bad when you start playing. Then play some more, get your first rank and feel motivated. In time, you’ll observe how high the skill ceiling is and how low you rank among the global players. But that’s okay; we’re just playing the game for fun, right?
Graphics
For online multiplayer games, we generally don’t pay much attention to the visual up-gradation that comes along with high graphic settings preset, because low graphics = high fps. However, thanks to a stellar optimization, Rocket League can be played on most systems at medium-high settings and looks extremely polished, especially with Anti Aliasing (AA) cranked up to max.
Although I don’t recommend using high settings for your day-to-day gaming, it’s definitely a boon to have if you use it with the Replay feature if you’re into some in-game photography or video making.
Skill and Rank
Being an officially recognised eSports game, Rocket League can become highly competitive as you up the ranking chain. Ohh, I’m talking about some serious gamers, the ones who play with Cheetos-covered controllers, with an energy drink on the side and no idea what the weather is outside. No offence, most of us have been there, but the point is that you can fully expect to play against people who are much more skilful than you.
Based on my gaming experience, Rocket League has a seriously underrated Ranking System. Matchmaking is well thought out and pretty identical. But the best thing is that ranks get reset at the end of every Season. So, you’ll never get stuck in the same rank for a long time, unless you’re as bad as the game thinks you are, of course.
Dealing with Toxicity
Online ✓
Competitive ✓
Free to Play ✓
Aha, we have all the ingredients to make the perfect toxic mixture! At this point, everyone will probably laugh at you if you expect to play your matches with completely civil and polite people. Toxicity is the only downside of Rocket League and also explains the title of this Review.
Miss a goal? “What a Save!”
Bumped into your teammate? “Thanks!“
Had an own goal? “Nice Shot!“
All these sentences in quotes are the in-game chat commands players may use and boy do they use them. The only way to deal with this is to disable voice chat completely or just play the game with your friends and family.
Verdict
As I mentioned at the beginning, Rocket League is a big hit or miss. Either you like it a lot or you’ll find no reason to spend your time kicking a ball with your car. I would still recommend you to at least give it a go once, it won’t hurt to try. Like I said before, don’t fret if you’re bad at the game, everyone starts somewhere. I mean, look at me! I am a 130-hours deep, Diamond ranked player. I suck at the game so much that I use “vacuumcleaner420” as my username. I suck at making jokes as well.
Anyway, Rocket League gets an awesome 4.5/5.
I’ll increase it if I ever rank up, IF.
The Paper Byte 
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