Skate is near the top of my list of console games I wish had appeared on PC. I think most of us have a happy memory of playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in the early 2000s, but something about Skate made its absence on our platform particularly unjust. Maybe it was its sandbox structure, and how easily you could envision it gaining a flourishing modding community if it had appeared on PC. Maybe it was its physics simulation, and the inevitable, GIF-worthy, Garry's Mod-grade calamities that resulted from it.
We're starved for sports (extreme sports in particular) games on PC, so it's exciting to see a passion project like On a Roll pop up. It's being created by Jelle Van den Audenaeren, a self-described rollerblader whose background is in 3D animation and film. From the footage, On a Roll feels like a cousin to Skate, an interpretation of the sport that's less about collecting floating letters and expressing the skating lifestyle and more about the purity and elegance of movement on wheeled shoes. "I have been dreaming about a rollerblading game ever since I got into it in 1997, a game where you could do any trick you could think of and not be restricted by whether you actually had the guts to try it," Van den Audenaeren says.
As an unapologetic rollerblader myself, mostly in hockey form, I'm really excited about this game's potential. I'd have to go all the way back to 2002's Aggressive Inline to play something that features my favorite form of movement, and from the look of things this small team is having no trouble reaching a high level of visual fidelity, at least on the single map on display.
On a Roll, planned to release near the end of 2016, has already been greenlit on Steam, and is seeking support through Kickstarter for the next two weeks.
