I lit up once I first heard that Psyonix was making a Rocket League racing sport. It is one thing Rocket League gamers have been imagining for a very long time: We love rocket-powered automobile soccer, however certainly it may be enjoyable to carry out car acrobatics in races?
Then I heard that Rocket Racing wasn’t going to be a Rocket League mode or a brand new standalone sport, however a mode in Fortnite. My perhaps-unfair intestine response was: eugh. My greatest concern was that, as an extension of Fortnite, Rocket Racing would really feel like Fortnite slightly than the eight-year-old sport whose quirky, hard-to-master automobile dealing with I’ve spent effectively over 1,000 hours working towards. I’ve by no means gotten right into a Rocket League imitator; they water it down or simply do not discover the identical weirdly enjoyable legal guidelines of physics.
However then I attempted Rocket Racing this morning, and shoot: it seems I prefer it anyway. I additionally kinda just like the Lego Fortnite survival mode Epic added earlier this week. What the heck? Am I a Fortnite participant now?
As predicted, Rocket Racing’s vehicles do not deal with like Rocket League’s. Modders make Rocket League impediment programs the place masters of its free-flying controls use their absurd abilities to principally do car-kour, and this is not that. Rocket Racing vehicles deal with nearer to Fortnite’s current fleet of autos with the spirit of Rocket League’s acrobatics baked in. Psyonix has tailored the essential ideas of Rocket League—you’ll be able to enhance, soar, and fly—into controls that apply to familiar-looking Mario Kart or F-Zero model programs. It is not straightforward to grasp, essentially, however you’ll be able to’t do the zero-G Olympic diving routines that Rocket League gamers do.
The vehicles have rear boosters that may be fired to go sooner, however they do not work like jet engines that ship you careening into the sky like in Rocket League. As a substitute, “flying” is a perform of the soar button, which prompts rocket boosters connected to your automobile’s undercarriage. These engines carry you vertically like a Harrier jet, with out danger of tipping over, and the button will be feathered to get you throughout massive gaps. Air dodging left, proper, up, or down shortly sticks you to the closest floor in that orientation. It is a extra automated course of than in Rocket League, but it surely’s fairly neat to immediately be driving on the ceiling at a whole lot of miles per hour.
Crucial maneuver is drifting, which occurs naturally once you take a tough nook, and will be assisted with rocket boosters. Like in Mario Kart, a profitable energy slide concludes with a velocity enhance to propel you down the subsequent stretch. Mixed with leaping and dodging, that makes for lots of the way to attempt to optimize your driving line by means of every course.
All of the races I’ve performed up to now have been aggressive, with at the very least a couple of racers jostling for first on the finish, and there is already a ranked mode. There are 26 maps by my rely, starting from easy circuits the place down is all the time right down to tracks the place I began to overlook which method was up—till I by accident pressed the soar button whereas inverted and fell off the observe.
I actually do not like Fortnite’s essential interface—the oversaturated discipline of thumbnails and notifications agitates me, in an admittedly previous man sort of method—so I am unable to say I am glad that Rocket Racing is a part of Fortnite and never a brand new mode in Rocket League, which I’ve had on Steam since lengthy earlier than Epic purchased Psyonix. It’s enjoyable, although, and it is onerous to complain an excessive amount of a couple of free sport.
Since I am digging Lego Fortnite, too, I assume I am leaving all 57GB of Fortnite put in for now. I shoulda pulled the set off on a 4TB SSD in the course of the Black Friday gross sales in spite of everything.