I used to play roller hockey pretty seriously when I was younger. I thought it might be fun to skate casually again, but also maybe I'd get bored of it, so I wanted to buy some entry-level skates. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if I had to buy some better ones after a while. Basically, these are fine, and accomplished their purpose, but I do think I'll have to upgrade them sooner than I was imagining. They aren't bad, and part of the problem might be me trying to skate at a level I haven't actually reacquired yet, but there are some flaws with these skates. Some of the flaws are totally reasonable compromises that make sense. But some are, in my opinion, definite design flaws and the company should have known better. A. The laces only go up to the base of the foot, rather than up the ankle, and there's no way to attach them on the ankle. You might think that since there's the velcro strap across the ligament and the plastic thing around the ankle, that would be fine, but it isn't. It's very difficult to get the laces tight just across the foot, since you can't anchor them higher and pull tightly. You can get them kind of tight, but not very tight. The problem is that since you can't get a very tight fit on the foot itself, if you want a really solid, responsive feel from your skates, you have to go tighter on the ankle and ligament straps. I had to get those 2 to a level of tightness that was actually a bit painful after a while in order to have a really solid skate & go fast. It might not be obvious to a beginner, but also a beginner probably shouldn't learn on suboptimal skates. To fix this, I may have to cut a small hole in the plastic near the ankle to get a solid lace-up just over the feet, and I don't even see a great place to do this. When I was a kid, I had some entry-level Rollerblade-brand skates which were similar in terms of lacing setup, but also had some cheap hooks near the top of the ankle, which made it easy to get them tight over the feet, and then I would tie the laces at the top of the heel and secure the plastic ankle strap thing over the knot, which worked very well. I don't know why Rollerblade would abandon that system, but they shouldn't have. It worked very well and enabled me to continue using my entry-level skates for quite some time before I genuinely needed better ones. B. The wheels that come with the skates are pretty low-quality. This is actually a good move on the company's part in my opinion. Replacing wheels is normal, and you can buy whatever wheels suit your needs later. So it makes sense to use bad wheels to lower the product's price point, since it would be silly for me to pay more money for skates that came with good large-diameter sport-court rink wheels, when what I wanted was small-diameter asphalt wheels. Nonetheless, you'll probably have to get new wheels comparatively soon. C. The skates come with a heel brake that you can't easily remove. I mean, you can take it off with the included hex key, but then the wheels won't go back on properly. Personally, I hate the heel brake, and wanted it off as soon as possible, but I would need washers to reattach the rear wheel, and I didn't have any. Ultimately, I ended up just cutting most of the heel brake off so I could use the ends of it as makeshift washers, but this isn't really idea. It seems like it would be easy to just throw in a few washers or an additional short axle bolt for this purpose. I know that probably a lot of beginners won't even understand why you would want to take the heel brake off, let alone be annoyed that the tools to do this aren't included. But it was really annoying for me, and it doesn't seem like it would be expensive to solve. D. Trying to relearn how to do hockey stops, I've already started to grind down the wheel frame and the shell on the boot a bit. I don't know if this is just my fault for doing them badly, or if it will actually affect the structural integrity of the frame, or if it's just totally unreasonable to expect to be able to do hockey stops over & over on concrete with entry-level skates, but there you go. Overall, these skates served their purpose. For a typical beginner, they'll be fine, although I still think the issue (A) is just a total screwup on Rollerblade's part, but it doesn't make them useless. If you start to really like skating you'll have to get better ones though.
