In the spirit of accelerating my progress towards a certain milestone that should be fairly obvious if you read into the numbers closely enough, Rocket League was always due to be an easy catalyst for that, with a very simple trophy list requiring no more than what turns out to be a very basic checkbox exercise.
Incidentally, we're also breaking new ground here, as the first title to ever be awarded lower than a 3/10 in difficulty rating, and the easy ones always tend to be the hardest to write about because there isn't usually much to say about them.
Rocket League, to be brief, which won't exactly help me pad this out, but for the purpose of staying true to the game and it's very simple nature, is football with cars. In all fairness, the game is loaded with content and has been provided with a huge amount of post-launch support, which is well evidenced by a whopping 9 DLC packs containing additional trophies. So, even though, at it's core, the concept is very basic, it is also important to acknowledge how the developers have stuck by the game and consistently added a variety of new game modes, car models, customisation options and trophies.
The trophy list contains a medium-sized offering of 36 trophies, and the vast majority of these are absolute throwaway, for a game that is easy to pick up and play, and very forgiving with it's overall difficulty of challenge.
The "Champion" trophy, awarded for Winning the Season Championship, should be your sole focus straight off the bat, where you can complete (and hopefully win) the Rocket League Championship. This is where you can effectively begin to make proper inroads on this list and leave yourself very little left in the way of clean up.
This format is highly customisable, where you choose between a number of parameters to create the Championship to suit your own preferences. You can make it as short as just 12 games (inclusive of Playoffs) or as long as 39 games. You can also choose the number of cars per side and the difficulty level of the opposition.
Once you've set these parameters out, you then just need to win the lot in order to unlock the trophy. I would strongly recommend setting up the longest season possible, as this will give you greater opportunities to unlock the miscellaneous trophies within the list along the way, and the longest possible season will give you ample opportunity to do this. It's also a good way to fulfill some of the more slightly grindy, albeit still limited in challenge, trophies within the list.
Matches are set at a standard 5 minute length, and there is only additional time to be accounted for in instances where there is a kick off after a goal or if the score is tied after 5 minutes, which triggers sudden-death overtime and will continue for as long as it takes for the next team to score a winning goal. If we keep it simple, and assume 39 matches at 5 minutes each is 3 hours and 15 minutes, we can account for the additional time accrued for the above separately and estimate a full season will take somewhere between 4-5 hours to complete.
Even the difficulty modes you can choose between don't seem to have much of a difference between them all. These are listed as Rookie, Pro and All-Star, and even playing through the Championship in All-Star mode gave me very little problems, and although I did lose a handful of matches, I extended the Playoff bracket to 6 out of 10 teams, so qualification was easy. If you want something to take away as a notable point, this trophy requires you to win the Championship, which does mean you will need to be unbeaten throughout potentially 3 playoff games and if you lose, you'll be restarting the entire season. Thankfully, I did not need to, and won it all on my first attempt.
By my own estimates, I reckon you can easily achieve 19 trophies from this entire list by playing a full season, and you can also make some strong progress towards a few others that you'd effectively just need to "tap in" by loading up a few exhibition games and finishing them off. The list also likes to see you dabble within the customisation and exhibition mode options, which can see you net around another 6/7 trophies, which doesn't exactly leave you much left to do upon completion of these extra-curricular activities on top of the Championship Season.
It would usually be relevant to mention a couple of other trophies, such as the "Stocked" trophy, awarded for Collecting 150 Items and the "Battle-Car Collector" trophy, awarded for Unlocking all Battle-Cars. The former inparticular would require you to play 190 matches. You start with 33 out of 223 in-game items unlocked, with the rest being unlocked every time you complete a game in any game mode. Incidentally, the trophy description was never amended from 150, which was the full collection at initial launch, but you'll need to play 190 matches because they've increased the number of items available throughout the game's lifespan, they just never adjusted the wording of the trophy.
By the same logic used for completing the Championship season of 39 games of 5 minutes being 3 hours and 15 minutes, this would mean 190 games in total would be almost 16 hours of match time, plus any surplus stoppages or restarts in between, so this would make a slight difference to the difficulty rating. The only reason these trophies don't need to be considered further is because they were automatically awarded to me upon booting up the game after a spell away from it. Some research led me to discover that the developers had recently unlocked everything for all players, which subsequently unlocked those trophies at the same time, cutting away huge portions of additional effort required on my part.
I won't list these trophies as notable, even though they would be under normal circumstances, but given the fact I didn't have to actively take any steps to achieve them in the end, I can't speak from my own experiences of having to unlock them, and as such, this actually gives me greater justification to score the game lower than usual. I think it sums things up nicely when justifying the Platinum difficulty rating that some of the more potentially challenging trophies automatically unlocked for me because the game decided to gift out additional items as part of a community favour to it's fanbase.
This actually ends up being a rare occurrence for any game, whereby putting it off for so long actually worked in my favour, and whilst I wouldn't have been adverse to having to fulfil 190 games to grab this Platinum trophy, it wasn't exactly unwelcome. It means I can put pure focus into the host of additional trophies within this title, which are extremely well supported courtesy of a slew of DLC packs released post-launch. Just like FIFA too (a fair comparison), it's the sort of game that is always more entertaining within a Multiplayer setting, and whilst it does look like you could tandem the main list in conjunction with the DLC content quite nicely, achieving the Platinum before applying proper focus to any DLC is much easier to plan and prepare for.
For a game which already, at the very maximum, is hard to see beyond a 3/10, and given the fact I am always conscious about under-rating scores, having the game effectively gift wrap a few of it's challenging trophies made this a much easier conscious decision to make.
Going through a full season within a matter of hours will see you unlock at least half of the entire trophy list, and the clean up process is nothing more than reading down the list, ticking off the requirements and moving onto the next. There's nothing that ever makes you think twice, nor stall your progress, and where there is the potential element for grind that some of the earlier achievers of the Platinum trophy may have experienced, for those of us who were handed the shortcuts, this was a much smoother journey.
It cuts down the completion time drastically from somewhere within the 20 hour mark, to my estimate of around 7-8 hours, and with no difficulty-sensitive trophies to consider, and with difficulty levels that provide little challenge, this is all about just going through the motions. Just out of pure curiosity born from playing on All-Star difficulty and still finding the game a complete breeze, I played a few exhibition games on the Rookie (lowest) difficulty level, and it was almost offensively easy.
Just make sure you close out the Playoffs within the Championship Season to make sure you don't have to playthrough this again, but even in worst case scenario, you could complete a second season within just 12 games, so it wouldn't exactly be the worst thing in the world to have to re-do. Let the game devs do the rest of some of the harder work for you, and you'll fly through this list in no time, introducing what is now technically, the easiest Platinum trophy within my collection.
Notable Trophies -
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| Champion - Win the Season Championship. |
Champion
Win the Season Championship
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