Super Party Sports: Football Review

Looking at Super Party Sports: Football, your first impression will probably be very similar to mine – this looks like a mobile game.  The thing is you would be right – Super Party Sports: Football, is  a port of a game available on both iOS and android, and it shows, but behind the cutesy graphics and obvious touch screen focused controls, lies a highly addictive physics puzzler that I stayed up far too late playing on more than one occasion.

The idea is one we’ve seen countless times before – take aim, adjust your power then fire, hitting the various objects in your way.  This now classic game trope has had a football sheen applied, and the aesthetics work surprisingly well – pass the ball between your team mates, positioned in various locations around the level, taking out the opposing team by hitting them with it along the way.  Yeah, somewhere along the way the actual rules of football got lost, and the game is well aware it is no FIFA, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to play.   Once the opposing team has been taken out, you are able to then pass it to your striker (read: player positioned closest to the goal) and score, thus finishing the level.

Super Party Sports: Football hooks you in from the onset with a few early levels that serve to introduce the physics and various game mechanics, and before long you’re taking out the opposing team like nobodies business.  At first, I was concerned that the game was going to be too easy, as I quickly ploughed my way through the first few sets of levels without too much trouble, however the game does a good job of upping the difficulty later on in a variety of ways such as lowering the time limit required to finish each level with the maximum 3 trophies or with new mechanics, such as platforms that can be raised and lowered requiring you to tactically eliminate the opposing team.  I found myself, over the course of a few gaming sessions, well and truly hooked.  I would play a few levels, and before long realised I should have gone to bed about an hour ago, which to me is the base definition of an addicting game.

One of the main hooks that the game employs is that of collecting coins  scattered throughout the levels, that once collected can be used to buy costumes for your team, a purely superficial purchase, or by buying power ups that you can use once per level, such as adding time to your current play-through for every player you take out.  The more cynical gamer in me clearly saw these as the micro-transactions from which they spawned, but thankfully these have been eliminated from the console version that I played, and the game itself is all the better for it.  I would tactically bash through each level, collecting the coins as best I could, then come back to the levels I had been unable to score the maximum 3 trophies on the first time round, spending whatever coins in my possession until I had met the requirement I was missing during my first attempt.

The cutesy graphics serve to define the game for what it is – at no point did I forget that I was playing a simple physics puzzler, and I found I would quickly boot it up and play a few levels while waiting for a game to download or as a quick five-minute distraction before I had to rush off and do something else, and to that end Super Party Sports: Football works a treat.  The biggest criticism I can muster, besides it having a rather long and convoluted name, is that there is an annoying whistle sound that forms part of the game’s soundtrack, that once noticed is quite difficult to ignore – a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things.  Another minor complaint is that for those of you reading this in the UK, the game lacks any other home nation team besides England – I say minor but for those of you that reside in the other 3 countries that form the United Kingdom you could probably think of nothing worse than having to play a game as England, even if simply means that your team play in a white strip.

So should you spend your hard-earned pennies playing Super Party Sports: Football? If I am to be brutally honest it is a game that at first glance I would think twice about spending my money on, but nonetheless a game I did thoroughly enjoy playing.  Would I recommend it? Absolutely.  In a day and age where people regularly spend a small fortune on mobile games and then some more on stupid in-game purchases that mean nothing, Super Party Sports: Football is a game that is well worth a look.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Microsoft Xbox One code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.