While the extreme sports subgenre has been feeling pretty well absent for quite some time, outside of classic Tony Hawk titles getting remasters, there was a time when they were huge. Between Nintendo’s own 1080 Snowboarding, SSX Tricky, Motocross Madness, and others, there were plenty of opportunities to catch air and trick to your heart’s content a few generations ago. While Rooftops & Alleys isn’t quite in that same vein, to some degree it does feel like a descendent of some of those titles, featuring a few outdoor areas where your objective is to find some great routes, chain together your tricks, and look pretty badass in the process… at least that’s the idea.

Tapping into the parkour trend a few decades too late, you’ll be doing quite a lot of running, jumping, rolling, and stunting in this title. For the most part all of that works pretty well and goes smoothly. Where I found I struggled quite a bit, and that’s even returning to the game a few times to see if somehow I could pick it up after a break, was in landing with any consistency. Granted, there were absolutely extreme sports titles where this wasn’t an unusual problem, so to some degree being critical of this one for having the same challenge can only go so far. That said, without too many contemporaries for quite some time, perhaps the skill floor here is a bit high for newcomers, or gamers like me who may have played a number of those titles, but are feeling quite rusty these days trying to pull them off.

The thing is, even removing the challenge of landing, and how no matter what great tricks you’re able to chain they won’t matter if you crumple into the ground when you try to finish things out, there are other issues. The first is that perhaps the areas you’ll have to run around in are a bit too limited in their variety and their audacity. I can understand wanting there to be a grounded real-world component to the design, helping it all to feel more authentic, but honestly the memories that come to me first involving these sorts of games from yesteryear tend to be when things got a little nuts. Granted, since you’re running around on foot, perhaps there aren’t too many opportunities to catch some insane amount of air or launch off of something like a flagpole to complete some epic run, but so much of the experience here feels quite vanilla, and that honestly clashes with the subgenre’s roots. If you’re looking for something grounded and working as more of a sim-like challenge perhaps you’ll enjoy it more, but the end product simply doesn’t feel terribly ambitious.