Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game’s ethos is perfectly described by its own subtitle. This is quite simply, “The Parkour Game.” For decades, we’ve had many big-budget open-world titles implementing freerunning into their exploration, like Assassin’s Creed or Dying Light. Parkour in these games feels satisfying, but the controls are simplified as it’s just another tool in games with very broad focuses. When you get a game more holistically focused on parkour, such as Mirror’s Edge, it’s usually an extremely fast-paced experience that wraps up after a few hours.

Rooftops & Alleys breaks these trends by focusing on an elaborate freerunning system whilst also providing total player freedom. Whether you want swift, efficient movement or ridiculously elaborate displays of style, Rooftops & Alleys has you covered.

But how much can an excellent parkour system carry a full game? Well, if it’s fun enough, I’d say it absolutely can, but Rooftops & Alleys stumbles just often enough to make enjoying the game a constant battle. Despite an excellent core, issues across its movement systems and empty levels always seemed to limit its potential. How much these issues will bother you will come down to personal experience. When Rooftops & Alleys is at its best, it’s an amazing experience. Unfortunately, it’s rarely at its best.

Arcadey sports games, a match made in heaven

As the game is fully based around parkour, one can expect Rooftops & Alleys to provide a variety of options. The player can run, jump, climb and perform tricks freely across each map. Each level features challenges that task you with speedy races or scoring points by stringing tricks together. Where Rooftops & Alleys differentiates from other arcadey sports games is the focus on realistic movement and a strict adherence to precision.

Parkour in Rooftops & Alleys is deceptively difficult, and unfortunately, poorly taught. A brief, rather basic tutorial introduces most mechanics back to back before thrusting you into the wild. It makes no effort to teach you how these abilities synergise together, or advanced techniques such as building big combos. One may appreciate the lack of handholding, but Rooftops & Alleys would greatly benefit from teaching its mechanics more gradually. Challenges immediately require an understanding of movement that the player hasn’t had the time or opportunity to develop. Techniques only vaguely alluded to, such as the extra height given from mid-air tricks, suddenly become essential. 

Meanwhile, vital mechanics such as sliding, ziplines and pole grabbing are completely absent from the tutorial. I suppose the aim was constant trial and error, but it makes the early game such a chore. The first couple of hours consist of figuring out how every little piece fits together, instead of building these skills naturally. Even now, I still encounter bizarre jumps in later trials that I wish I had some guidance for.

However, once everything finally starts coming together, freerunning across Rooftops & Alleys can feel amazing. Shooting across the environment while mixing in flips and rolls, constantly choosing in the moment whether to prioritise speed or style. Movement becomes immensely satisfying as you learn how to overcome routes that were once difficult to traverse. Character animation is so unbelievably charming and by far the game’s most impressive element. Despite a simplistic art style, your character’s movements are delightfully detailed. The tricks strike a great balance of looking expressive while feeling realistic. The quantity of tricks and jumps the player can perform all flows together seamlessly, it’s incredible. 

Each level provides a decent amount of variety. Individually, they tend to focus on environments that encourage different styles of parkour, such as purely rooftop action or tight, condensed spaces. Location choices are quite realistic while still feeling mostly distinct from one another. I do wish a couple of levels had leaned further into unique designs, such as the school or the steelyard. These two offer little individually, and suffer from being a bit too open and lacking parkour options.

Perhaps the toughest sell regarding Rooftops & Alleys is the lack of content. There are only six levels with eight challenges each. This wouldn’t be so bad if there were more emphasis on interesting objectives or exploration, but each area is quite barren. I wish there were more secrets, notable parkour routes or engaging objectives such as those in the Tony Hawk series. This absence only becomes more prominent when realising how long it could take to get good at movement to begin with. Since there are few beginner-friendly challenges, a player may find little to do before encountering an obstacle they are unable, or uninterested in overcoming. Simply exploring and getting the hang of freerunning can be a blast, but these limited options may struggle to keep you invested over time.

The biggest selling point that can potentially alleviate this issue is the emphasis on multiplayer. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to test this in the final build, but the mode has been functional in the game’s Early Access for quite some time. Multiplayer allows groups to explore levels freely or initiate extra games such as tag or capture the flag. These features are quite enjoyable, and the freedom of parkour does feel built to be shared amongst friends. But the steep learning curve and limited game modes make this a tough sell for the multiplayer alone.

Ultimately, you’ll end up spending most of your time in either time trials or score challenges. The former is the stronger experience; levels often have difficult routes designed to be completed as quickly as possible. Going for gold medals requires perfect runs as well as understanding when and where you can cut corners. I do wish this mode had a quicker option to restart, or even the ability to teleport to the last checkpoint. With so many difficult jumps that can immediately ruin your run, better options for replaying and practising would be appreciated.

I want to like the score challenges, but I find their design bizarre. Each one seals the player in a confined area that gradually shrinks over time. These spaces are often so tight that there’s little room to utilise the surrounding buildings in your combo. More often than not, you’re stuck with a flat space, forced to run in circles doing flips and rolls. As a result, the score challenges fail to use the freedom of the parkour system. The player’s toolkit is severely limited in these sections or removed entirely. They completely fail to take advantage of the game’s smart level design and end up feeling extremely repetitive. No matter what map you’re on, the strategy for these tasks ends up the same every time.

While the camera operates well in standard freerunning, quick turns and tight spaces can cause some issues. These struggles frequently occur in both forms of challenges. If the player doesn’t adjust the camera before a jump, the perspective won’t align with their destination. This can cause the player to not be aware of immediate obstacles, and sometimes results in jumps failing to register properly.  It’s especially damning for scoring points, as the camera and trick controls can’t really be used simultaneously.

Parkour in Rooftops & Alleys can feel so amazing under the right circumstances, so it’s agonising how there’s so little to do. What it ultimately comes down to is how much mileage you get out of learning the movement mechanics. For some, Rooftops & Alleys will be an immensely rewarding game to master, sinking endless hours into improving your times. For others, it can be a relaxing game to regularly return to and unwind after a long day. But for many, what’s on offer here simply isn’t enticing enough to make players stick around.