[Review] Rooftops and Alleys gives us stylish parkour

From walls to steel girders to rails and, well, to alleys, it’s time to put our feet all over this city

I’m a big movement guy when it comes to video games. From racing games to skateboarding, how we move in a gameworld is really important to me, so Radical Theory’s Rooftops and Alleys seemed to tick all the boxes.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a parkour game with the addition of scoring via tricks, judgment of our movement and our talent in moving through the environment. There are six maps in the game, and up to three other players can join us. There are challenges that are scattered around these maps, with some being races, some being trick competitions, and then different variations and mixes of those.

The game is loaded with skill-based tricking and traversal, and all six of the maps have different challenges and opportunities for us to remix our skills, so the movement becomes key. And thankfully it’s really good. Our right trigger lets us run, and holding that and pressing buttons does certain actions. The left trigger is kind of like a tweak button that lets us do variations, almost like a hotkey press. For example if we tap Y it may make us do a roll, but if we hold left trigger and Y it will let us side saddle dash over a short ledge. It does take some getting used to. I think the tutorial actually does a really good job. I even ran it again after I’d already played the game a while, just to check up on how I remember accessing all the abilities.

The only drawback of the game is that it’s overly consistent. The first five minutes of our time with the game is the exact same experience as the last five minutes of our time with the game, and there’s nothing really there to drive us to stay around other than self-challenging ourselves.

It just feels like there’s just nothing really driving us to stick around with the experience. I was talking to my partner about it, and made the analogy that it kind of feels like ordering a lot of food from our favorite restaurant. It sounds like a really good idea, and we order all this food, and then we get all this food. And then when it comes we eat 80% of it and think, “well, I have no more room for that 20%.” We know that 20% is going to go in the refrigerator, and hopefully we’ll remember it; we might reheat it, it might taste great the second time, but it’s never going to taste as good as the first time we had it.

Rooftops and Alleys has a really good first taste. It just may end up in the back of the fridge if we’re not in the mood for leftovers.

This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest Live for July 22, 2025. All images and video courtesy publisher.