Rocket League Review

Psyonix had already shipped this game once, in 2008, under a name nobody remembers, and the sequel's genius was recognising that the concept was never the problem. Rocket League gives you a boost meter, a jump, and a car with no weapons, and every skill that separates a beginner from a professional grows out of those three things. Aerials, dribbles, ceiling shots and flip resets were not designed by anyone at Psyonix; players found them inside physics that stayed deterministic enough to reward practice, and the studio was disciplined enough to leave them alone.

That is the rarest thing a multiplayer game can offer, and it is why the audience never left. Matches run five minutes, the ball is always on screen, and a comeback is live until the clock reads zero, which makes this one of the few competitive games that is genuinely pleasant to lose. There is no story worth grading and the arenas are functional at best, but the moment to moment control is close to perfect, and nothing since has replicated the feeling of hitting a shot you could not have hit a month earlier.