Parkour (or its more trick-centric cousin free running) has been a gaming staple for years, and while games like Mirrors Edge or Dying Light make great use of it, it’s rarely the star of the show. There are no iconic parkour games like there are for skateboarding, for example, which has Skate 3, Session, and half a dozen Tony Hawk’s games that all put the sport front and centre.
Enter Rooftops & Alleys.
You can’t talk about a parkour game without discussing movement, so that seems like the best place to start. In short: it’s great. It’s buttery smooth with a great sense of momentum, and has an impressive range of movements available. You’ve got ways to get you from point A-to-B efficiently, including a number of different ways to slickly pass over waist high obstacles, but then also a full set of tricks featuring all sorts of flips, rolls, and twists. The way you interact with the environment through the movement works really well, and it’s so satisfying when you string together jumps, vaults and tricks, punctuated by rolls to keep your momentum up.
You’ll take this technical toolkit out into one of six maps either by yourself or with up to three pals. What you do is up to you: complete activities, find fun spots to race through or trick off, or just explore the environment. The maps give off old school Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater vibes at times, ranging from a school to a container ship, to my personal favourite the skyscraper. These levels aren’t huge, but they’re full of verticality. Getting to the highest points in the map can sometimes take a lot of climbing, or, if you’ve found it in the level, you can transform into a pigeon and fly to the top. Don’t ask me why you can turn into a pigeon in a parkour game, but it’s a handy feature that lets you position yourself wherever you want in the map.
The activities themselves are a bit of a mixed bag. There are score attacks, which give you a small section of the map to get a bronze, silver, or gold score in. Trying to rack up huge scores isn’t for me, and the trick system feels naturally more suited to threading tricks into a longer line rather than constricting them to a single, small area. The time trials, on the other hand, are addictive little buggers. These are simple point to point races with checkpoints guiding the way. Getting a bronze (or even silver) score is fairly easy: just follow the route, don’t mess up, and you’ll earn a medal and some cosmetics for your trouble. Getting the gold score requires absolute mastery of the route though. You need to shave off milliseconds as much as possible by activating your sprint, dropping rather than jumping to reduce airtime, or cutting corners to eke out that little bit of extra time to give you the gold.
They can be very hard, and you’ll often be tripped up by your knowledge of the map or just your thumbs tripping over themselves. They’re great fun though, helped along by zero delay when resetting to the start. If you fluff up then tap up on the D-Pad and you’re instantly ready to go again. I did find a few of the checkpoints seemed bugged though, with some embedded in the ground making it unclear where to go next. In one case it made it almost impossible to hit the checkpoint while maintaining momentum too. Nothing game breaking, but a bit annoying when every millisecond counts.
These activities are essentially the only focused things you’ll have in each map to do. Your mileage is going to vary based on how much you enjoy them, and admittedly it does feel like a bit of a light package. However, the movement itself is such a joy that you may, like me, not really need a reason to jump into a level and start running around. It’s a great game to kill time with, and I’ll often ignore activities entirely in favour of setting up my own line through the map and trying to perfect that, or seeing if I can pull off a trick-filled route in first-person mode, where every flip and twist leaves you feeling slightly disoriented.
Visually the game has a nice, minimalist style with your character looking suitably edgy all in black with a pointy head. You can customise them with unlockables but nothing jumped out at me as being particularly exciting. I was happy just leaving them in the default gear and just focusing on the delicious movement. The game disappoints slightly with the audio too. A strong soundtrack is foundational for an extreme sports title, in my humble opinion, and Rooftops & Alleys lacks here, opting for fairly muted background beats rather than anything I’d be rushing to Spotify to add to my library.
Whether you play solo or with friends, Rooftops & Alleys will suck you in with its varied and seamless movement mechanics. If you’re the type of person who will hyper-focus on a single spot in Skate 3 for an hour trying to get the perfect line then you’ll get a lot of value out of this too.
