Apparently there’s actually tons of different strategies that people use, some people were saying they delay their kickoffs and others were saying they backflip into the pole or something. Some of them were just straight-up wrong but others actually had some pretty good points, especially depending on what mode you’re in, there’s tons of counter strategies that can be used against a standard kickoff.
It’s pretty crazy that even after almost five years since this game came out, the meta for kickoffs is still evolving, so anyway in this guide, we’ve done some research and experimenting for different and unique kicked off strategies and found three main ones that are completely unique from a standard kick off and they actually work super well.
Standard Kickoff Strategy in Rocket League
There’s three different standard kick off strategies for 2v2 and 3v3 that we are sure almost all of us know about:
- Send Back – You can try and just power your way through to the opponent’s half and then follow it up
- Power Through – You can try and purposely lose the kick off in a certain direction to send it back to a teammate
- Cheat Up – You can just try and kill the ball and have your teammate cheat up so they can follow it up
These are the three main strategies that pretty much all of us know about and they’re pretty self-explanatory we don’t think there’s a tutorial necessary to teach you how to do these kickoffs it, just takes a little bit of experimenting in practice. So here RocketPrices.com as the professional Rocket League items selling store, is just going to assume you know about each of these kickoffs and jump right in to the unique ones.
1. Unique Kickoff Strategy For 2v2
For this first unique kick-off you may have seen it around. Basically you have one player cheat up towards the mid boost on the left and have the other one do a fast kick off to try and tap it to them, you can get to it in any way possible as long as you’ll be hitting it around the opponent – some people like doing a pre flip sort of thing to get it to them, some people like doing a speed flip, and of course this can be done in either direction.
A good technique to use for this one is when there’s a player in each diagonal position, since it’s a widely known rule that the player on the left usually goes for the kickoff, you can instead have the player on the right go for it, so all he has to do is touch it before the opponent and he doesn’t have to worry about being too precise with it. All that actually matters is that he beats him to the ball and then it’ll be a perfect pass.
There is another version of this where the player on the other side actually cheats up right next to the kickoff and it hopefully pinches right Adam and then towards the goal but it’s extremely hard to pull off and it works just as well as the other version.
2. Unique Kickoff Strategy For 3v3
The second one is exclusively for 3v3, because you need one player going for the kickoff and the other two to back them up. The situation is there’s one player in a diagonal position and the other two are somewhere back in one of these positions, it doesn’t really matter which ones as long as they’re somewhere back there. This diagonal player goes for the kickoff but fakes it and heads for the mid boost as the other to back him up. And actually you can get Rocket League credits for some great cars. The player closest to the right puts himself about near to one side of the goal gate and the other puts himself about on the mid front of the gate. Depending on where the ball goes, one of these players will take possession. The player over there closer to the side needs to call out if he’s going for or not. If it’s behind him then he obviously can’t go for it, but if it’s in front of him then he has the priority. If it comes to him, he has a few options for what he can do with the ball, he can keep possession for himself and try a dribble play or pass it to one of his teammates but preferably this player since he has full boost, he should usually pass it instantly to one of his teammates since the player who just did the kickoff is likely following right behind the ball.
If you’re expecting to go try this out in game with your team and have it down instantly your expectations are probably too high it, definitely takes a ton of practice to make sure you’re doing it right and you don’t just throw away possession. For this strategy, we only recommend it for really high level players that are super confident with their mechanical consistency.
3. Unique Kickoff Strategy For 2v2
For number three this last one only works for 2v2 but it’s a really fun one. Almost all of you have seen the normal fake kickoff on this situation in twos – it’s pretty unique but everyone knows about it and once someone fakes the kickoff the other team knows exactly what’s happening. They faked the kickoff go for the boost and then try and do some sort of redirect play, that’s your standard fake kickoff strategy, but for this strategy instead of going for boost after the fake the player goes for a demo on the last offender, if they get it that’s a wide-open goal for their teammates.
The only thing that can make this strategy difficult is the fact that the last defender can dodge in pretty much any direction to avoid the demo and still have enough time to make the save.
More Rocket League Kickoff Tips
If you’re going against smarter players, you can kind of fake the fake if that makes sense. After you tried the strategy once the other team is going to be super aware about the possibility that you can try it again because of this sometimes when the other team is expecting a fake, they’ll hit the brakes right before they would be hitting the ball, but the only time they’ll actually do this is if they see that your teammate is sitting back in net. So after you do a fake early on in game if you get the chance again, you can sort of fake the fake by having your teammates sit back in net while you go, and do a normal kick off and try and power it through them.
As for the other two kickoffs since you can do those in threes, you can even alternate between those ones to try and throw off the other team even more, like one kick off you’ll be doing a fake and then the next one you’ll be hitting it before they can even reach it. The key is being unpredictable and if you can achieve that you’ll be one of the most annoying themes to play against but you will win.