Review
Fall Guys
A delightful, chaotic party game with a shallow bottom — perfect in short doses, thin over a season.
No. 17 in The Noteworthy 50 · Sports
Rocket League
Car football. Eleven years old. Still the cleanest competitive concept anyone has had this century.
Rocket League is the best pure competitive design of the last twenty years and it is not particularly close. The concept — cars, ball, goals — is comprehensible instantly by anyone. The execution is a deterministic physics simulation with no random elements, no hidden statistics, no loadout advantages and no character selection. Two teams, identical tools, and the entire outcome determined by skill and co-ordination.
What makes it extraordinary is the ceiling. The first hour teaches you to hit the ball. Somewhere past a hundred hours you are hitting it in the air on purpose. Past a thousand, you are chaining aerial touches, using boost economy strategically, and reading rotations three passes ahead. Psyonix never designed most of that — flip resets, ceiling shots, air dribbles are all emergent player inventions that the physics permitted. Eleven years in, top players are still finding new mechanics.
The five-minute match
It is worth calling out the session design. Matches run five minutes with a two-minute queue. That makes Rocket League the only game on this list you can genuinely play for fifteen minutes without feeling like you have wasted the launch. Compare it to a forty-minute MOBA game you cannot abandon.
The complaints are around the edges: a ranked ladder as toxic as anything in this list despite the friendly premise, smurfing that goes unaddressed, and a post-Epic content strategy that is essentially a cosmetics store with occasional playlists. But the core has not been touched, and it did not need to be. It was right in 2015.
What works
- Physics are deterministic, consistent and completely fair — no randomness anywhere
- The skill curve runs from 'kick ball' to aerial freestyling with no gaps
- Cross-platform play and progression across every system, seamlessly
- Matches are five minutes — the perfect length for one more
What doesn't
- Ranked competition is brutally hostile for a game about cars and a ball
- Content updates are almost entirely cosmetic these days
- The 2020 move to Epic removed Steam sales and some player-favourite features
- Smurfing in lower ranks is a persistent, unaddressed problem
The Catch — what it will cost you
Free since 2020, cosmetics only, no power for sale — and the physics are identical for everyone regardless of what you have spent. The Rocket Pass is cheap and fair. The one real loss was the removal of the trading system in 2023, which killed a player economy many enjoyed and replaced it with direct-purchase shop pressure.
Who it's for: Anyone. The concept takes ten seconds to explain and a decade to exhaust.
If you like this
Review
Brawl Stars
Excellent moment-to-moment design and a brawler economy that still gates too much behind luck and money.
Review
Counter-Strike 2
Mechanically the best FPS in existence. Everything surrounding it is a mess, and some of it is worse than a mess.