It’s finally here! Rocket League Sideswipe is available worldwide right now and it’s actually pretty fun.

First announced way back in March, most had kind of forgotten that Sideswipe had ever been announced. To begin with the game was launched as an alpha test for Oceania players, and then it just sort of… disappeared. And everything went back to normal.

Until earlier this month, anyway. On November 15th it was announced that Oceania would be receiving the “Preseason” of Rocket League Sideswipe, with a roll out for the rest of the world to come later. Well, Psyonix kept their word, and as of November 29th it’s now available to download worldwide.

Sideswipe is an incredibly simplified version of the main Rocket League game. The essence of what Rocket League is - car football, is there, but it’s certainly quite different to it’s bigger brother.

As the name might suggest, Sidewswipe is played with a side-on view with on-screen swipe controls. If you think of a side scrolling platformer game, and then merge that with Rocket League, you’re on the right track.

You use a virtual joystick on the screen to control the direction of your car, and also have buttons for boost and jump. Double tapping jump lets you double jump, but honestly that’s about the limit of your controls. You don’t have to worry about air rolling, drifting, half flips or any of that stuff, it’s pure and, most importantly, simple Rocket League fun.

At the moment you have three choices of game mode, duel, doubles, and Hoops. In Duels and Doubles, the goals are regular hole-in-the-wall affairs, but to add to the challenge, they’re raised up the wall so you need to get the ball off the ground to score. More annoyingly, given my lack of skill, you have to get into the air to save shots too.

The Hoops game mode is a fairly authentic recreation of the normal version of hoops from the main game. Rather than goals you have large basketball nets raised at each end of the court. And the goal is to dunk on your opponents. Unexpectedly I think I preferred Hoops to the standard mode, although both are genuinely good fun.

As you play games you rank up, with fellow RLG dev Serubi quickly carrying me to high bronze, a point where I was, depressingly, very much out of my depth. There was a lot of random flopping about throughout all of our games, but you do slowly get used to the controls. Some people faster than others though, judging by some of the moves that Serubi (and later, our opponents) was managing to pull off.

RL Garage users will be happy to know that all the usual customisation options are all there. Entering your garage you’ll find the usual options for your body, boost, wheels, goal explosion and more. Many of the items will feel familiar too because basically all of them seem to be recreations of items you’ll know from Rocket League proper. 

The only real new category of item is quick chats, which in Sideswipe take the form of little emojis rather than text messages. This system is a good addition to the game, being both quick and a lot more difficult to be toxic with, but sometimes it felt a little tricky to use the UI in the middle of a game. That GG muscle memory might take a little while to develop.

As you play games you earn XP which progresses you through the Rocket Pass. A new level means a new item is unlocked, and there are some great ones early on with Merc at level one, the Party Time goal explosion at level three, and the confetti boost at level nine. Those ranks seem to go quite quickly, with 10 to 15 games leaving me at Level 10 by the end of the night.

Some levels also reward you with credits which can be used in the in-game item shop. At the time of writing the biggest item there is the Party Time goal explosion in Crimson, which looks pretty great. There’s also a painted Merc, Dark Matter boost and more. These items rotate over time, although seemingly slower than the normal item shop at the present time.

Once a day you can also reveal a free Mystery Item which is pulled from a pool of 78 items, of which the Atomiser goal explosion being the star of the show. If you want to try your luck further, you can use credits to reveal more mystery items. These start at 100 credits, with subsequent unlocks increasing by 100 credits until your next free unlock.

Given that you’re on RL Garage, you’re probably wondering if you can trade items in the game. Sadly, Sideswipe doesn’t feature player to player trading, I was hoping that it would, but an FAQ on the Rocket League support website rather bluntly says that it’s not supported. You can salvage most items for credits though, which you can then use on the item shop to buy things you do want. It’s not the same, but in retrospect, I’m not too surprised either. 

Another question I suspect a few of you will ask is will RL Garage cover Rocket League Sideswipe? And the answer to that is, probably, yes! It’s still early days and obviously there’s a lot to be figured out, but given the strong overlap between the main game items and Sideswipe, it shouldn't be too hard. Officially: we’ll see. Unofficially: we’ll see, but with a bit more confidence behind those words.

If you want to give Sideswipe a go, you can click here to download it on the Google Play store, or click here to go to the App Store for iOS. If you do try it, let me know in the comments how you get on with it. It’s definitely an interesting experience but it’s gone down very well so far. 

There’s no creator code input in the game at the moment, or ability to buy credits for that matter, so I won’t tell you about the creator code RLGARAGE, #EpicPartner and all that, but if you buy things in the main game, you know what to do.

TLDR Download Links

Android Download Link (Google Play Store)

iPhone Download Link (Apple App Store)