How to Half Flip in Rocket League

Rocket League, at its core, can be boiled down to a simple game of car soccer. With its free-to-play accessibility growing the game’s popularity, and its prominent rise in esports viewership, many are beginning to realize just how technical this game actually is. While watching the best of the best pull-off ceiling double-taps and flip resets to score on other professional players, non-professional players can get a sense of what it really takes to be at the top.

One of the largest separators from player to player is car control. At every level of play, the driver’s ability to control their car is crucial to outmaneuvering the opponent and getting that highlight-reel play to show off to friends. While the pros make some of the specific techniques look like second nature, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get there. Here, we’ll go over one of the most important techniques to learn when starting to play Rocket League.

The Half Flip

What’s a half-flip? Well, a half-flip is an important technique for drivers to learn and can be used at every level of play. Players starting out may find themselves trying to utilize their car’s not-so-small turning radius to turn around and chase that ball that just slid past them. Drifting and driving to hit that quick 180 isn’t the worst option. The half-flip, however, provides a much faster solution to the problem.

The half-flip involves driving in reverse, quickly double-jumping backward, holding the opposite direction to cancel the flip, and air-rolling the car over to land on all four wheels to face the other direction. Sound complicated? Don’t worry. Here’s a more well-paced visual guide of how to do it:

Step One

That pesky ball just slid past again. But this time, implement the half-flip to quickly get back to it.

Start driving in reverse in the direction you want to go and, when ready, quickly double jump while holding down on the control stick to do a backflip. Here’s what that looks like:

This is a good way to get used to the beginning of the half-flip. Essentially, the half-flip is backflipping but stopping halfway to turn the car around 180 degrees.

Step Two

Once comfortable backflipping in reverse, we’ll add one additional move for step two. Once the front of the car is pointing toward the screen during the backflip, push the control stick forward. Doing this will cancel the flip and stop the car from completing the full backflip. Here’s what that looks like:

From here, the car will land top-side-down. That is okay. It’s supposed to. It’s worth getting used to the feel of this and creating the muscle memory to use this technique on command. Once there’s a good feel for that, move on to step three.

Step Three

Now that we can drive in reverse and do a backflip cancel, we can add the last component of the half-flip. 

This involves adding a slight air-roll, left or right, after the canceled backflip. Doing this will rotate the car to land on all four wheels and allow the car to keep driving in the direction it’s pointing. Here’s what that looks like:

Combing all of these steps together is known as a half-flip. A way for drivers to turn their car around faster than driving in a half-circle. This can be done standing in place, or on the move to keep the car’s speed and momentum.

Here’s what it looks like in a game:

With practice, troubles changing direction will be a thing of the past.