Marble Blast - The Revival

Rokkitball is a fast paced first person sports action game that allows up to 8 players battle it out in an arena with goals at either end. The aim of the game is to score in the opponents’ goal using your special weapon. To move the ball around the arena, you must use your gun to pick up the ball and fire it to wherever you want. You can also shoot rockets at your opponents in order for them to fumble and lose possession. The goal consists of 3 holes at varying heights – the highest and smallest hole gives you 5 points, the middle hole gives you 2 points and the bottom hole gives you 1 point.

The idea of Rokkitball is unique and straightforward. It’s simply a mix of basketball and the lovable deathmatch seen in first person shooters – except this is third person. Come to think about it, you could argue that it is similar to the Bombing Run game type seen in Unreal Tournament. The differences are that the arena is smaller in Rokkitball and the ball is a million times bigger. This results in unstoppable rocket wars with a giant ball flying around in random directions. Sounds chaotic but how long can that be fun for? Well, if you learn to play properly, Rokkitball will keep you busy for a very long time. At first you might have your whole team chase the ball around the whole arena with no positioning and on-the-spot all-for-yourself tactics. That’s not how you win. This game is very tactical and that’s a huge part of the fun. Each team needs its set players with set positions and roles – just like real sports with defenders, attackers and anything in between. This game even has certain keys assigned to allow quick communication between you and your team-mates - tactical communication, that is. This saves you time typing out ‘I’m free’ by which then the other team have increased their lead by another three points. The only downside to this is the remembering of all the shortcuts, but that’s how it goes. Once you’re all organised and have a team knowing what they’re doing and how to communicate efficiently, you can have some incredibly epic matches.

So how do you control your player? Again, it’s very simple; you use the W A S D keys to run/strafe and the space bar to jump. To run faster than normal, hold down Shift and your desired direction, but be warned that this drains your energy so keep on eye on that. To jump even higher, you jump once then when at the apex of your first jump, press the space bar again. This is called a double jump and is in fact another similarity to Unreal Tournament games. To get control of the ball, you must be near it to ‘pull’ it in – holding down the right mouse button will keep the ball in your grasp. When in possession of the ball, it’s never a good idea to hold in to it for a long time because you will be bombarded with rockets even before you get your first touch. So it’s best to pass it to your team-mate as fast as possible and then move to a good position. To fire the ball away (hopefully in the oppositions’ goal or to your team-mate), simply click with the left mouse button – make sure you get the right angle of trajectory, though.

So now we’ve told you what Rokkitball has to offer as a new release for InstantAction, we’d now like to give suggestions of our own. There’s no doubt that new content is in the works as we speak, but we’ll list anything and everything that comes into mind.

• Firstly, there should different arenas that can be played in - perhaps even have differently laid out goals and possibly even change the gravity/physics on certain special maps.
• We’d also like to see different characters that can be chosen to give an individual identity to each person.
• Each time you score for your team, you get a special meter bar on your screen which allows you to use some special ability. For example, faster running, invisibility or greater weapon strength.

These are just a few of the simplest ideas that we, and many others would like to see implemented in Rokkitball in the near future. If you have any ideas yourself, please feel free to comment and let us know. Remember, Alex Swanson will also be able to reply to your comments so if your idea could make its way to Rokkitball itself! But for now, enjoy Rokkitball and all of the other brilliant games on InstantAction!