Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game

Ever since I played the original Mirror’s Edge, way back on the Xbox 360, I have been craving a game that delivered a true parkour experience. Parkour is captivating to me; I love the fluidity of the movement and the free-flowing visual that you can see in a great run. Mirror’s Edge gave me glimpses of that feeling, and its sequel did the same, but still, I was left wanting more.

I always wondered what would happen if you took the idea of parkour and combined it with something like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Would this be the type of game that I was craving? Is Rooftops & Alleys (R&A), which cites the Tony Hawk franchise as being a major influence, deliver the experience I was dreaming of?

Let's just take things straight from the start. R&A starts players out by offering a tutorial option from the main menu which is meant to teach you everything you need to know about the game. It runs you through a straight hallway and shows you each of the game’s main maneuvers. You learn to Sprint, vault, flip, wall run and grab ledges. It can all be completed in less than five minutes. After that is done you are dropped into the deep end of the pool of Rooftops & Alleys. I hope that you paid close attention during the tutorial session because there isn’t a lifeguard on duty!

This proverbial pool that I'm speaking of consists of six unique levels, each with a different layout and aesthetic. They range from construction sites to school campuses and even a small urban town environment. Each one of these levels is filled with a variety of score and trick challenges that you must locate to initiate.

As you complete them and earn different “medals,” you unlock new apparel cosmetic items for your character. One would expect these challenges to ramp in difficulty as things progress; perhaps they should start you off by encouraging you to try and execute simple tricks and runs and train you to view the world to design longer runs as you get better. However, that doesn’t happen.

Instead, as I said before, you are in the deep end of the pool at this point, and it is sink or swim. While you know what buttons perform the different maneuvers, you don’t know how and when to properly use them. It is truly up to you to put in the time and effort to master these skills by your own trial and error. That’s great if you can find the drive and dedication to put towards that, but if you’re turning to this for a relaxing and enjoyable experience, you are going to simply find frustration.

Without that slow ramp that you find in other games, it is very easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged. All the videos and runs that you see people do online is great, and you get a feeling of, “Oh, I would love to do that.” But it is much easier said than done.

That feeling of progression would have also helped to make this incredibly steep learning curve more tolerable too, if you had moments of reward or plateaus of accomplishment. Instead, you will consistently be watching your character ragdoll towards the ground, thanks to the extremely small margin of error for both landing tricks and nailing/grabbing certain points in the environment. Grabbing onto a pole or wire should be relatively simple, but it isn’t; if you’re not lined up perfectly, it is going to result in a complete failure.

There are some tools available to alleviate this frustration a tiny bit, such as being able to set a marker in the game world that you can return to in an instant. This helps to get you back to the starting point for a run that you’re trying to put together. There is also a strange ability to turn into a pigeon and reach higher, more desolate areas at will. It’s cool, and often helpful, but seems very odd and out of place.

This insane difficulty and unforgiving gameplay were enough to drive me mad. There are certainly rewards and feelings of gratification to be found for those who are willing to stick it out and perfect the skills that are available. I imagine it would be a lot more beneficial, too, if you had someone playing with you who knew how to utilize those skills, teaching you along the way, because the game surely doesn’t do that for you. The online options available give you the same experience as the offline, with little to no direction or focus. As a result, I found it very difficult to get into games regularly and rarely had people join mine.

R&A ends up being less of a game and more of a sandbox. That is great for those who have mastered the gameplay and have a collection of friends who are into the experience. That isn’t so great for someone breaking into the world and just getting started. With the lack of structure of something like Tony Hawk which has a progression system and slowly increases the difficulty as you move from stage to stage, players are dropped into R&A's world and left to make of it what they will. 

There is a foundation here that could be built into something bigger, but it is going to be up to you to do that work. I envy those who have been able to focus and master the experience offered here, because all that I have gotten from it is headaches and frustration.