Rocket-League
A game where there's more than meets the eye.
Project maintained by wsong02 Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
ROCKET LEAGUE
Hi! I’m William and as well as being a 1st year BSc Economics student at LSE I also like to game.
Have you ever heard of the game Rocket League? If you haven’t, then you are most definitely missing out! Unless gaming is not your thing…
Rocket League on paper is a very basic concept. You simply have either 1, 2, 3 or 4-a-side football with cars and 5 minutes to try and score more goals than your opposition. But it’s a lot more complex than that! I’ll explain all this to you in this introduction to rocket league.
Mechanics
The world of rocket league mechanics are endless, and to this day people are still discovering new ways of playing the game that constantly up the level of gameplay. No many how many hours you put into the game, there is always something that you can learn to do.
Driving and Jumping
The car in rocket league operates almost the same way as the car in real life. You can drive forwards, turn, or drive backwards; then you can also jump, which sends your car up into the air above everyone else. Other players watch you in awe while you look down upon them as if they were peasants.
Not only that, but you can double jump to go even higher! This is extremely important because sometimes to save or score the ball going for top bins you need that extra bit of height, and this second jump gets you there.
If you combine driving in a given direction with double jumping at the same time, you are able to flip your car in the direction that you are moving in, i.e. if you are driving forwards you will flip forwards and if you are driving to the left you will flip sideways. This is just as important as jumping because it allows you to hit the ball with momentum and POWER.
Boost
Then we have boost. This is the heart and soul of every Rocket League gamer.
Boost or score the goal? Boost.
Boost or save the enemy’s goal? Boost.
Boost or do something useful for your team? Boost.
With boost, you can do anything! (Theoretically)
Boost is what you can use to propel your car in the direction that its facing, since the “boosters” of any car lie at the back. It can help speed you up or, if you jump, then you are able to fly. Very cool eh?
Using boost while jumping propels you into the air where you can let your creativity run wild. You can spin, flip, fly in any direction you want while you have boost, being able to do crazy things like the gif below:
Cosmetics
Rocket League just has really dope animations and cosmetics. Enough said.
Strategy
Rocket league isn’t just about flexing the hundreds or thousands of hours you spending perfecting a certain mechanic; it’s also about using your brain and thinking your actions through (gamers using their brain?!? impossible!).
In rocket league the most common and effective strategy is rotation. This is where you and your teammates take turns at hitting the ball in order to allow time in between for you to get boost and position yourself on a map. If you had to always hit the ball while your teammates just watched then you would quickly run out of boost and be rendered useless as the enemy beats you in a race to the ball, so keeping this in mind is extremely important to playing the game later on, but don’t worry about it if you are just getting started!
An infographic on how rotation works is shown here:
E-Sports
I’ve saved the most exciting part of rocket league for last: E-Sports.
As with any huge online multiplayer game, rocket league has its own tournaments around the world where the best players in each continent battle it out to decide who is the best! These players will pull off mechanics that you and I could never dream of doing and the intensity of every second is bound to get you sucked into the game.
While gamers are commonly mocked for spending too much time doing something wasteful (not arguing that it isn’t if played excessively), on the e-sport level it really shows what thousands of hours of dedication into one’s own craft can achieve, and should inspire all of us to work hard in our individual endeavours and aspirations.