Rooftops & Alleys is a refreshing take on parkour – less a narrative adventure, more a pure celebration of movement and style. With its inspiration rooted in the likes of Tony Hawk’s trick system and Mirror’s Edge traversal, the game delivers a satisfying combination of tricks, combos, and free‑roaming action. It’s easy to pick up and visually vibrant, making it instantly appealing – but with a surprising difficult learning curve.
One of the most immediate aspects is just how good it feels to run, jump, vault, wall‑run, and flip. The controls strike a fine balance: deep enough for combos like corkscrews and XP gainers, yet intuitive enough for newcomers. Successfully chaining moves feels rewarding, inspiring repeat attempts and creative flair.
The game channels the spirit of games like the Tony Hawk series. It’s about stringing together seemingly impossible tricks but based on realism, with a banging electronic soundtrack.
Medals are awarded for different scores and times on speed runs. I was struggling to work out how to shave off precious seconds before realising there is a speed ‘boost’ for doing tricks, which encourages you to balance a fine line between risk and reward on your runs.
Multiplayer modes include Tag, Capture the Flag and Trick Battle. Chasing players around trying to catch them is amazing, especially when you consider that you need to trick for speed boosts. When you have competent players in this mode it’s really something to watch.
This is where the biggest challenge lies though. Whilst the controls are reasonably easy to understand, getting your brain in gear in order to process what to do and how requires a lot of learning before it can be committed to muscle memory.
This is where the main draw is though. With 6 maps, each containing a number of challenges, the longevity of the game is really about perfecting the movement and gliding round the maps, carving out routes and making it your own playground. The maps are decent, my favourite being an indoor purpose built parkour arena.
For the real hardcore, there is a first person mode although I found this a little too much for my stomach but is cool nonetheless. Occasionally I tripped up on the controls, but I don’t think I would go so far as to say that it’s bad, but not always super forgiving regarding inputs – this could be addressed by even more practice of course.
It looks like the developer is committed to further content and maps which is great to hear. There are a few parkour games on the horizon, and Rooftops and Alleys is a solid game which is getting the jump (pun not intended) on its competition by a quality release ahead of the other runners (pun intended this time).
Reviewed on PS5
