Rocket League is ridiculous. It’s a multiplayer soccer game that involves rocket-powered cars, and many silly hats. On the surface, the irreverence makes Rocket League an accessible videogame, appealing to people who might be controller-averse; on a deeper level, it’s mechanically impeccable in ways that even the most seasoned of gamers can appreciate. That’s why Rocket League has become one of the year’s most commercially successful and critically lauded games. But past its outlandish exterior, Rocket League emulates real soccer in surprising ways. This isn’t soccer, the world’s most popular sport that is regularly mired in all forms of international politics and scandal. This is soccer in its purest form: a game of ball-handling skill and athleticism, that just happens to involve a car.

via reddit user TreeBeard___

Rocket League’s mechanics are dead simple. You drive your vehicle and try to push a giant ball into the other team’s goal. Each player has a limited amount of rocket boost that can be charged by running over specific areas on the field.

All of this is sort of intuitive. Anyone that's played a Grand Theft Auto game will be right at home maneuvering their weird rocket car around the field. And yet it does take some getting used to; at first, you'll likely charge at the ball, whiff, and get turned around enough to lose your bearings.

The most popular soccer game in the world is, unsurprisingly, the officially-licensed-by-the-corrupt-organization-itself FIFA series. It has been around for 22 years, and each iteration renders its players more lifelike, its stadiums more convincing. But I think FIFA is more of an accurate representation of what it’s like to watch soccer on television than to be playing the sport itself. I decided to ask several independent game developers and critics whether they believed Rocket League was better at capturing the spirit of soccer than FIFA.

According to Steve Swink, indie game designer and author of the book Game Feel, Rocket League’s success comes from its perfectly calibrated controls under the hood. “The tuning of the car's turning radius, the acceleration, the friction coefficient of the wheels, the slip of the brake, the top speed of the car, the adjusted acceleration of the boost—these things come together perfectly to make the player feel complete control,” he said.