Everything was fine. My Rocket League partner and I had scored three times early on, and though the other team was scraping together a comeback with back-to-back goals, we were still ahead. But for some reason, my buddy decided to leave mid-match. Now, I was alone.
2-on-2 is my favorite way to play Rocket League right now. Thereâs just the right amount of chaos, while allowing for plenty of interesting strategies between two players.
If youâre playing in unranked matches, the game will fill empty spots on the playing field with bots. If youâre playing in ranked matches, however, those empty spots will stay empty, so if a player drops outâor their Internet connection boots them offâthe match becomes lopsided.
(Right now, thereâs zero penalty for quitting matches, but thatâs getting addressed in a patch.)
Iâm not sure what happened to this player. Maybe they decided to quit after our opponents scored another goal, figuring the momentum was swinging the other way. Or, perhaps, they lost faith in me. Either way, I was confronted with two scenarios:
Join the quitters club and look for another match
Suck it up and become a hero
I chose the latter, and went off to war.
Iâm an overly conservative player, preferring to let others duke it out with one another, while I patiently wait for the ball to bounce just right, creating an opening. In order to have any chance against these two, Iâd need to choose my battles carefullyâany mistake could be fatal.
My general strategy? Let the other team mess up; I needed to take the easy shots. But since I was currently in the lead, I wanted to focus on wasting time. When youâre ahead, itâs usually easier to prevent the other team from getting a shot off than actually lining one up yourself.
Three minutes may not seem like much time, but in Rocket League, it can feel like an eternity.
I knocked more than a minute off the clock before screwing up a defensive turnaround, handing them an incredibly easy goal.
Argh. If my partner had been around, maybe theyâd have stopped that, but this is all on me.
My approach had to change, as I no longer held the upper hand. Now, I desperately needed to score a goal, which meant waiting for an opportunity. When youâre playing with multiple people, you can take some chances and go for a sexy trick shot, but that probably wouldnât work here. A missed shot could mean Iâm on the wrong side of the map.
Thankfully, opportunity came knocking 30 seconds later, after sweating bullets and trying to avoid situations like this too often:
Canât do much good when your car is on the ground, but I quickly turned lemons into lemonade because the other team couldnât figure out who should be the one to deflect a fortuitous bounce.
(This happens all the time in Rocket League, since voice chat isnât common with strangers. You have to read the location, velocity, and movement of other players to figure out whether you should be the aggressor or back off and hope the other player is ready to command the ball.)
Fortunately for me, they screwed that up! With a little over a minute to go, I was ahead again.
This would not last, though. A botched attempt to send the ball towards the other side of the arena gave someone a chance to tap the ball, and there was nothing I could do.
This one was a heartbreaker. 40 seconds is plenty of time for something to happen in Rocket League, but as the seconds tick down, the more anxious you become about the next shot. The more anxious you are about the next shot, the more likely you are to completely screw it up.
What gave me hope, however, was knowing Iâd kept the team on their heels. With a few exceptions, they were chasing me, not the other way around. So if Iâd taken advantage of that before, maybe I could do it again.
The next goalâthe one that assured my victoryâinitially perplexed me. I managed to send the ball sailing in the right direction, and set up a relatively straightforward shot. But how come no one even tried to stop me from pulling this off?
Why is one player hopping around like theyâre on a pogo stick? And where is the other one?
While putting this together, I loaded up the replay, went searching for answers, and found this:
Basically, they knew Iâd landed the perfect shot, and did their best to flip and flop to the other end of the arena, hoping Iâd mess up the finish. That was not meant to be, and I was in the lead.
After another 21 seconds of sending the ball flying into the air, the match was over. Iâd won.
Against all odds, Iâd saved the day. Playing without a partner isnât how I want to play Rocket League on a regular basis, but Iâve had few greater thrills than finishing this match on top.
Onto the next one.
You can reach the author of this post at [email protected] or on Twitter at @patrickklepek
