Super Kickers League is a surprisingly fun game but it does have some flaws that may get in the way of truly enjoying it.
Type: Single-player
Genre: Sports
Developer: Xaloc Studios
Publisher: Just For Games
Release date: 24 Jan, 2020
Intro
Super Kickers League is a family-friendly street football game that’s a little rough around the edges. If you’re still interested, do read on to find out more about the game.
Game Modes
Super Kickers League features 3 separate game modes to play through. The first is Teams mode which includes 3 sub-game modes including (quick) play, cup, and league. Teams pits the blue team against the red team in a match. It’s a pretty standard game mode. In quick play, you can choose the parameters of the match including length, the allowance of special powers, difficulty, the location and who you wish to go against. Cup Mode is set up similarly to what you’d see in Mario Kart, where you play through a series of matches to win the trophy for the area. The cups are based on each of the game’s 5 locations. Initially, League mode is locked for play but once you complete all of the cup mode areas, you’ll unlock it for play.
The other two game modes include Kickers Mode and Retro Mode. In kickers mode, you get to choose 3 team leaders to go up against another 3 in quick play, cup and league modes. Retro Mode is locked until you’ve completed the previous game modes.
Teams and Special Abilities
The game features a total of 10 teams to choose from. Each team’s players have their unique look and special abilities that they can utilize during a match. The team Blazing Aces, for example, can unleash a bunch of fireballs from the sky to stun their opponents. The Sonata Sisters, on the other hand, can cause their opponents to dance for a period allowing them to easily get past their defenses. Every team has their unique abilities for you to discover. During a match, the ability must be charged fully before they can be utilized in the match. You charge them by scoring goals and actively defending the ball from your opponents.
Some Things That Could Be Improved
As I was playing the game, there were several areas that I noticed that could be improved a bit to make it a bit more fluid. First is the character animations. The walking animation is the most awkward-looking one. The characters are incredibly stiff in their movements and when they’re walking around it becomes that much more noticeable.
The characters also feel a bit stiff while controlling them as well. Especially when you’re trying to manoeuvre around an opponent, turning around brings the character to a complete stop to turn around and then proceed. This takes a bit of the fluidity out of the controls when you’d normally need to avoid an opponent taking the ball. This is also noticeable when you try to make sharp corners around an opponent, they turn in a very wide angle which makes it a bit difficult to make precision turns.
There was one other weird thing that happened as well. I wound up losing my entire save game somehow and I’m not entirely sure why that happened. I shut down my PC at night and I went to play more of the game in the morning and my saved game and progress was gone. That was quite disheartening to be sure considering I made a lot of progress through the game modes. Not entirely sure what caused it but figured it was worth mentioning.
Verdict
Overall, while I wound up finding Super Kickers League pretty fun, the stiffness and awkward animations took a bit out of the enjoyment of the game. With some improvements, the game could become something quite entertaining, especially for arcadey fans but as it stands now I’d have to give the game a pause, sadly. It’s got some good ideas but it feels a bit flawed compared to other games in its genre. Sadly, this is one of the only arcadey football games that has released on PC in many years so, beggars can’t be choosers as they say. Still, I do hope the game improves and I wish the devs luck in their endeavours. Until next time!
