How To Get Good – The Basics
How To Get Good at Rocket League
This a quick guide for anybody who is just starting the game and looking to understand the basics of the game to start progressing to that next level.
I want to note that the things listed in this post will not take a few minutes to learn. Rocket League is a very complex game and if you’re expecting to shoot through to the highest rank in a weekend, then you’re in for a bad time. It’s going to take you hundreds of hours to learn just the basics and then even longer to learn the more advanced mechanics.
Camera Settings & Ball Cam
When you first start the game chances are you have the default camera settings and haven’t quite researched much into how important your camera settings are. As this is just a basic guide pointing you in the right direction I won’t go into too much detail on this topic.
The best advice I’d give people here is to head over to Liquipedia and have a look at the camera settings that pros use and find one that works for you. If you’re on Steam you can use Bakkes Mod and have them all loaded into the game for you to select. If you’re using Epic Games BM won’t quite work yet.
Hitting The Ball Hard (Powershots)
This seems like an obvious one, but it’s one that is actually quite overlooked by people who are starting the game.
An essential skill in Rocket League is hitting the ball hard (most commonly referred to as booming the ball). Powerful shots are hard to defend and when used correctly it can put your opponents in a really awkward position allowing your teammate to capitalize on them being out of position.
Booming the ball is essential for defending your half, it will give you time and space to create a powerful counter-attack or allow your team to recover from awkward situations.
As you progress through the ranks, infield passes become more common and weak hits will start to be intercepted more frequently leading to you losing possession and potentially goals in your net.
If you want to learn more about hitting the ball hard, Turk of SRZ has an amazing video with a quick overview of how to do it.
Kickoffs
When you first start the game you’re going to suck at kickoffs. As you get better at the game you can start to learn more advanced kickoffs but we’re just going to cover a basic one here as it’s not worth your time practising things well out of your skill range.
Winning a kickoff can be the difference between winning and losing a game so learning how to do the basic kickoff early will help you massively.
Again, we’ve got a video from our coach Turk explaining exactly how to do a regular kickoff.
Aerials
This is probably going to be the hardest thing you will learn. Learning how to aerial properly is going to take you hundreds of hours.
Aerials are very hard. They require you to both control your car in the air and use the right amount of boost to get to it.
This is a difficult one to explain via text so I’m going to handover to Kevpert who’s got a great video on aerials.
Possession
Most people don’t think too much about possession because they just focus on smashing the ball as hard as they can, which sometimes is right but a lot of the times it will hinder more than it will help.
If you have space and boost, most of the time the best thing you can do is control the ball and keep it close to you. As you start to progress through the ranks you can start to incorporate more advanced mechanics like dribbling and flicking the ball. But we’re not going to cover them here.
This is something that will help you rank up in 1s a lot faster as you won’t be hitting the ball to the opponent for no reason and giving them possession.
Teammates & Tilting
“My teammates are all bad and they keep missing easy saves!!!!!! THEY’RE THE REASON I’M LOW RANKED!!!!!” – We hear this in RLCD almost daily and it’s almost never the case.
You have to remember that this game is hard and people will mistakes (including yourself) and the best thing you can do is be positive. Shouting at your teammates or getting mad at yourself will only do one thing and that’s losing games.
Losing games in Rocket League can be pretty crushing and learning how to deal with losing as early as possible will help you. Try to keep calm, remember it’s just a game and your rank really isn’t important as you’re still learning the game and it’s going to take hundreds of hours before you master the basics.
Mechanics
More often than not people will watch pros hit a flip reset and then go into freeplay and practice them for hours when really they should be learning how to play the game and master the basics. If you’re a low ranked learning flip resets and musty flicks then you’re going to struggle in the higher ranks because you haven’t actually learnt any of the basic mechanics that you need to progress further.
Mechanics are cool and super flashy but until you’re in the top ranks there’s absolutely no need to spend your time learning them. You can get well into the higher ranks without scoring fancy mechanical goals.
As your start to get into the highest ranks in the game feel free to start practising fancy mechanics but it’s really not required at all.
Freeplay & Training Packs
This is going to the most useful thing you can do. Freeplay is one of the best ways to practice hitting the ball, aerials and playing the game faster. I’d recommend playing at least 20-30 minutes of freeplay practice a day so you can put everything from this guide into practice.
Rocket League has community made training packs that will help you practice certain scenarios. Wayprotein has a great spreadsheet where you can filter it down to your current rank and get practising them.
We also have a list of training packs here: Rocket League Training; The Ultimate Training Pack Guide For Diamond and Below Players
Grinding & Final Thoughts
Remember, this game is hard. Like, really hard. It’s going to take you a couple of hundred hours before you can even do half of the things listed on this page.
Every player in this game who wants to get better must put in the hours. Whether those hours goto ranked or freeplay is up to the player’s preference. However, the experience gained from ranked is much better than freeplay as its a good testing grounds for whatever you’ve learned. So go out there grind ranked, do your drills, do freeplay, custom training and most importantly don’t forget to have fun.
