Rocket League is a superb game to play solo or with friends. What's better than football (or soccer, for Americans), hockey, or basketball with many different styles of cars?

 

For starters, we'll begin with the bad end of things for Rocket League.

 

--- As of December 2023, Psyonix removed player trading from the game to fall in line with Epic's terms and conditions regarding digital items being tradable for IRL currency... except... it was digital currency with an IRL value set by Psyonix. Not to mention the sheer number of players that got scammed out of valuable items in the year preceding the removal of the system.

 

--- The game is highly technical. It's not something you can just pick up and go with. It takes lots of playing, adjusting, training, etc. to be able to play the game effectively at almost any level.

 

--- There are times when the ball physics make little to no sense. Follow that up with times when the game will randomly turn your car upon landing, and you're in for a not-so-fun ride.

 

--- The system for the drop boxes appears to be highly rigged. You're more prone to get "Legacy" items, or dupes of items you already have. Dupes have a higher chance at higher rarities, whereas legacy items have higher drop rates at lower rarities.

 

--- Although the player trading system got removed, there is a trade-up system in place. Unfortunately, it's rigged in a similar fashion that the drop boxes are. You have a very high chance of getting a dupe of something you own instead of a new item.

 

--- You can randomly earn a blueprint for an item... but you have to spend premium currency to craft it.

 

--- Since going to the F2P framework, the Rocket League community has gotten flooded with tons of toxic players. They can be temporarily banned for it, but you'll run into them almost every game regardless.

 

--- F2P allows players to make multiple accounts, which results in plenty of so-called "smurfs" to ruin your gameplay in ranked modes. I understand the purpose of wanting to play with your friends, but players are allowed a significant rank gap to go into modes with. If your rank matters more than playing with your friends, then go to the casual modes. It's quite literally why they exist.

 

Now for the good, which everyone likes to see.

 

--- Plenty of items in the game for nearly limitless customization. Cars, decals, wheels, boosts, trails, goal explosions... you name it. I dare say the possible combinations lie in the tens of trillions... if you can get the items.

 

--- The number of game modes is fantastic, especially when the seasonal or limited-time modes roll around.

 

--- There's tons of licensed items. Ranging from Ghostbusters to The Mandalorian, and then back to... the future!

 

--- Some items have animations, which makes your already great looking car more fabulous.

 

--- Finding a match for any mode takes seconds. The F2P framework boosted the RL players massively, therefore reducing wait times of minutes down to a few seconds.

 

--- The game is compatible with keyboard and mouse, as well as controller. This gives players options to find what control scheme suits them best. For me, it's a controller... because I got clumsy fingers.

 

--- The custom game modes allows you to set up never-before-seen modes to play with friends. There's plenty of modifiers to configure the game parameters, as well as every map in the game... including the test maps from the labs.

 

All-in-all, Rocket League is a fantastic game to play. It's very enjoyable with a party of friends to take into the various modes, but also quite enjoyable to play solo. Especially with some of the community's unique personalities that wind up on your team sometimes.