Roguelikes are getting everywhere these days, but I hadn’t seen an Air Hockey Roguelike… until now! Priced competitively, this delightfully retro looking, sounding, and playing air hockey game has RPG-like upgrades to your abilities. As the opponents get faster, more aggressive, and more unique abilities, you’ll need skill and upgrades to keep up.
Air Hockey Roguelike has a distinctive late 80s graphical style and soundtrack to it, but it is a dress-up for some modern-day roguelike gameplay. Each air hockey match is a race to score 7 points, or whoever has the highest score after 2 minutes. Movement is simple, and you come equipped with a dash ability that requires recharge time. Dashing into the puck can send it flying across to your opponent, yet you’ll also have a core strength stat for your standard, too. These, alongside the size of your body and your movement speed, can be upgraded from a randomised choice of two attributes whenever you win a match. After each match, you are then offered randomised choices to either take on another match, try out a trickshot to earn cash, or go to the shop. After a few encounters, you’ll reach a boss who will have a unique ability, and if you beat the boss, you’ll move to a new arena shape, upgraded AI, and a new boss to work towards.
You don’t earn cash through matches, which makes the trickshot a requirement to level up. Trickshots are timed, and the player is confined to a container on the screen to aim a shot that bounces off of multiple walls to slam the puck into the goal. These are fun and reward precision and creativity. They also give you money to spend in the shop. The shop contains three (initially) randomised items that can be categorised as active or passive abilities. You can buy and hold up to 4 active abilities and these are used in battle, triggered with your shoulder buttons. They include things like stunning the opponent for 5 seconds, stealing a goal from the opponent, turning the lights back on if they are turned off, or changing the time remaining in a match. Passive abilities are ones you don’t trigger, and you can hold up to 6 per run. These can include beefing up your stats, making your body bigger, starting off with a goal in hand, or even reducing matches down to 10 seconds each. The most powerful passive abilities cost a lot of coins, though, so get good at those trick shots!
At the start of each run, you’ll feel a little slow and clunky, but with a few upgrades under your belt, you’ll be zipping around the arena defending from all kinds of shots. The bosses are a challenge, as they usually are a step ahead of you stats-wise, but they can be overcome with skill. The AI is also decent enough to provide a challenge. It reminds me of mid-’90s tennis games, where you try to get the AI to one side of the court so you can then blast the ball to the other side, meaning that they don’t have time to run back. Air Hockey Roguelike follows a similar play style. It’s a single-player affair, so no multiplayer.
For £2.49, I had a blast with Air Hockey Roguelike. The roguelike elements work well and are tangible upgrades and abilities you’ll want to use (only once per match, mind), and the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun and consistent. I’ve played far less satisfying full-priced sports games!
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