Rocket League Sideswipe

Typically, when an online multiplayer game makes the transition from console to mobile, one of two sacrifices has to be made. Either the game comes over as-is and suffers thanks to unintuitive touchscreen controls, or it gets redesigned as a spin-off, losing some of the oomph of the original, but feeling a lot more at home on the platform. Psyonix chose the second option with Rocket League and created Sideswipe, blowing everyone away with how it still felt like the source material, despite the redesign. As a testament to its quality, within days of its release, professional Rocket League players were raving about Sideswipe and playing it as a legitimate counterpart to the original. As a fresh perspective on a familiar game, Sideswipe picked up steam pretty quickly.

When I think of Rocket League, I think of two things - playing "soccar" and customizing my vehicles. While there's more nuance to it than that, I feel like my experience generally boils down to those two things. In that sense, Sideswipe does everything that I would expect from a new Rocket League game. The soccar matches have been converted to 2D and the stadiums are much smaller, but matches are still very competitive and a lot of fun. New maneuvers for blasting the ball were added here as well, giving more talented players even more options to keep their opponents guessing. Plus, Sideswipe carried over the game mode "hoops", which in itself should be enough to sell you on the game. Unfortunately, not everything made the jump to mobile at gracefully as the sports.

The vehicle customization suffers a bit thanks to its reorientation towards the mobile market. While the fun of the competition can be enough to hold the attention of console players, it seems like mobile players always need to be unlocking or collecting things. Sideswipe accommodates this by having you collect every item and its variants separately and individually. Most items have multiple color options available, but you have to collect each differently-colored item separate from one another, and then if you want to put an item you collected on more than one car body, you'll need to collect the item multiple times. In the regular Rocket League, once you have an item, you can use it in as many loadouts as you want simultaneously. The change in this game makes it easier to get items but also makes them feel less exciting since you aren't always getting something new.

If vehicle customization doesn't matter to you at all, which is fine since it doesn't actually affect the main gameplay that much, and you enjoy the original Rocket League, then Sideswipe is probably going to be a lot of fun for you. Honestly, even if customization is important to you, I think that Sideswipe will still be enjoyable. It's frankly extremely impressive how much this feels like Rocket League, even though it's just on my phone, and I don't think there's really a better option for quick online competitions on mobile than this.

The game is available for Android here (as of 1/23/22): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Psyonix.RL2D&hl=en_US&gl=US
The game is available for iOS here (as of 1/23/22): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rocket-league-sideswipe/id1549027048

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