Supersonic Acrobatic Real Soccer Simulation: Rocket League Review

Rocket League feels exactly like real soccer because it looks nothing like real soccer.

This review was originally published on January 12th, 2016.

The craziest thing about Rocket League — a game where jet propelled cars flying around inside of a huge plastic dome try to punch a giant metal ball into a goal — is that this ridiculous game feels more like playing soccer than any iteration of FIFA or Pro Evolution Soccer ever has. Just ask Time Magazine who calls it “football unbound,” or Honest Trailers who make the claim about 30 seconds into their video.

So how does Rocket League do it? How does this crazy game recreate soccer better than its officially licensed peers? Simple: Rocket League focuses on the core, minute aspects of soccer instead of trying to look like the real thing. Let me explain…

The core challenge in soccer, the problem that generations of teams have all tried to solve in different ways, is “how do I get that ball, into that goal, using anything other than my hands.” From second to second, that is the question every team is answering. All of the creativity and athleticism that makes soccer interesting to watch and fun to play centers around that challenge.

Any game that’s trying to replicate soccer should start with that challenge and Rocket League does a pretty good job. It translates the scenario into “how do I get that ball into that goal using this car.” You’ve got a lot of options. You can simply tap the ball with the nose of your car creating a pitching wedge style shot. You can use the jump button to recklessly toss your car at the ball. You can slam on the boost after jumping and try to guide your car into the ball with the finesse of a two-ton missile. The options feel infinite and the response is immediate thanks to the game’s simple RC-car controls.

FIFA’s design, on the other hand, translates soccer’s challenge into “how do I pass the ball amongst these players to set up an opportunity to take a shot that has the best chance of being a goal.” In contrast to Rocket League’s “whatever works” approach, FIFA is more restrained; it focuses more on strategy. Instead of concentrating purely on putting the ball in the goal, you have to think more about maintaining possession and juking around your opponent. You consider things like, “Should I send a speedy winger up the side and cross a pass into the box for a header shot? Or should I rely on my fleet footed striker to weave through defenders and walk it past the goalie?” And “Is one lob pass more effective at getting the ball downfield than lots of little ground passes?” In addition, FIFA’s controls make the game feel as distant as the default skybox viewpoint.

It might seem counterintuitive that the world’s biggest soccer videogame would be so disconnected from real-world soccer’s core. But, as soon as you consider the requirements a development team would face when assigned the FIFA project, the picture begins to become clear. Imagine the first thing the project lead would write on the whiteboard. My guess: “1.) Needs to look like the soccer people are watching on TV.”

That’s where the compromises begin. Once FIFA has to look like something else, the design needs to move in a certain direction. The game isn’t free to do whatever works best, it has to fit a certain mold. The most apparent evidence of this is the moment when the game’s probability systems take over. Take, for instance, this gif.

At some level, it becomes clear that FIFA relies on a probably system to determine the outcome of events. Team attributes and the skill of the person holding the controller certainly play the biggest factors in deciding who wins and loses, but, just beyond those factors, a system is rolling a dice to determine the result of every crucial moment.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing. Such systems are so fundamental to game design that complaining about them almost feels like complaining that a novel’s story is written in sentences. But although the system is common, in this application it’s still not ideal. A better system would be one where players have complete control over their team. A system where tiny inputs make the difference in each play instead of a probability system. As any Sports Science segment will tell you, that’s how the real world works.

That idea may seem too complex to implement. We’ve seen what happens when you give players precise control over another human body and it’s not pretty. So maybe the player can’t be a human…maybe it needs to be something with simpler controls…like a car? That idea would never end up on the FIFA whiteboard since you couldn’t release a game with Lionel Messi represented as a Ferrari, but Psyonix didn’t have have those restrictions. They were free to, as Psyonix Founder and President Dave Hagewood called it, “follow the fun.”

As a result of following the fun, the Psyonix team created a game that takes the simple concept of having control in a physics engine, and combined it with the classic challenge of soccer. The lack of any hard-coded probability system meant the game wouldn’t look quite as beautiful as the beautiful game, but the surprising side effect was how authentic it felt.

Creating that feeling should be rewarded, as feeling is the one thing videogames can create that no other medium can. Sure, watching soccer on TV can be fun and exciting, but it can’t give you quite the same rush as pulling off the perfect “kick” in Rocket League.

For designers, Rocket League should be a case study that examines when to use a dice-roll system and when to let the physics engine run free. But for players, Rocket League is simply the rush of one of the world’s oldest and most loved games, now in a convenient thumbstick controlled form.