Rollerdrome has one of the best elevator pitches in recent history: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater + Quake 3 Arena. This is immensely relevant to my interests, but I knew it’d be awhile til I got to it, and conveniently by the time I had time to play it, it had migrated over from being PC/PS5 exclusive to also being available via Game Pass.

It COMPLETELY lives up to the elevator pitch. The game is based around a future bloodsport (similar to plenty of other Classics), and is structured shockingly similar to THPS. You’ve got an arena to skate around, you’ve got 10 goals like doing a certain nose-grind trick, or wall grinding across the ski lift, or getting all the combo pickups, or keeping up your combo chain. But then there are also enemies in the arena, and they give you guns, and the guns reload when you do a trick. Kill enemies, dodge bullets, crash through a window and do a sick 720 into a 50/50 grind while unloading shotgun blasts into a giant robot’s face.

It’s awesome but it’s a lot to deal with. The game uses every button on your controller, and unfortunately being able to move some of them back to paddles doesn’t really fix the problem, because it isn’t the location that’s the problem, it’s the fact that you have to maintain all these different possible inputs in your head simultaneously and then actually execute them. If you aren’t tricking every opportunity and dodging and quickly flipping your reticle around backwards perfectly the game will completely devour you.

My fingers and brain are not properly equipped to handle this game. It’s just too much. I managed to make it about halfway through, and enjoyed it thoroughly, but the controls are just overwhelming.

I did have a final thought that maybe this is a situation where if I can’t personally play to enjoy, maybe it’d have a super interesting speed-run scene and I could enjoy it that way. Well… not really. There’s only really one competitive speed-run category and it’s NewGame+, so you start out with all weapons unlocked. This means the final weapon is open to you from the start, and it’s a charging railgun that can one-shot most mobs from any range. This means the speedrun is an endless string of nearly-impossible-on-controller trick-shots where you have to snipe everything as soon as it spawns, which ends up pretty boring.

The game is great but it’s do demanding from a difficulty perspective that it’s hard to recommend without caveats. So if you’re getting it from Game Pass, or getting it for like a dollar in a Steam Sale, go for it, strong recommendation. If you’re not, just be ready to hit the sheer cliff face of difficulty.