You can tell exactly where Rooftops & Alleys gets its inspiration from. A little Skate 3 here, a lot of Mirror’s Edge there – as it says in its official title, it’s a parkour game, and the goal is to allow you to run and jump around a cityscape as much as you can, using everything around you as a platform or a landing spot.
This is both a good and a bad thing. The good news is that it feels a lot like its influences. If you’ve ever pined for a game where you can climb up everything you can see, run across gaps with a wall-run, or leapfrog over obstacles to your heart’s content, Rooftops & Alleys is it. And, as a bonus, if you’re fond of ragdoll physics and painful-looking falls, it has those things too.
The bad news: its influences are from fifteen years ago (as is the episode from The Office with the “Parkour!” cold open), and it makes the game feel like an anachronism in 2025. To be sure, parkour has become such an integral part of some games – the whole Assassin’s Creed franchise, for starters – that it’s not like no one has parkouring any more, but at the same time, the game feels like someone saying, “You know what parkour is? Pretty cool, right?” and then leaving it at that.
Which is probably the game’s bigger issue, which is that there’s not really a lot of content here, especially in terms of single-player mode. You have a couple of environments to explore, and…well, that’s all there is to do if you’re playing solo. You can run around a few maps, jumping the gaps, climbing walls, and trying the odd time trial, but that’s all there is. It’s definitely more exciting if you have three friends and you can try any of the multiplayer modes like capture the flag or tag, but even then, the game feels a little limited.
Mind you, it’s not so limited that I’d say you should ignore Rooftops & Alleys entirely. It definitely shows promise, and if it were to add in more objectives for solo players or game modes for multiplayer I could see it achieving that promise. At the moment, it’s definitely not there, but it may be worth keeping an eye on the game to watch how it evolves.
MLMEDIA provided us with a Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game PC code for review purposes.
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