Pro Jank Footy: the direct heir to FIFA Street and NBA Street, except it is Australian and completely unhinged

There are two ways to do sport in video games. The first is to simulate, with licensed names, tactics and transfers. The second is to take a ball and do something stupid with it. We belong to the second camp, and if you came up through Mario Strikers, FIFA Street and NBA Street, you know exactly what we mean.

Pro Jank Footy is the latest of that line, and it pushes the principle further than its elders.

The central mechanic is excellent

Here is the idea, and it is better than anything the genre has produced in a long while: when you score a goal, your opponent picks a power-up. Not you.

That single reversal solves the most tiresome problem of sports games among friends, namely the match that tips over and becomes a one-way humiliation. Here, leading means arming your opponent, and every goal mechanically brings the backlash closer. It is a catch-up system, but disguised as comic escalation rather than as shameful assistance.

The advertised catalogue passes a hundred and fifty power-ups, and they do not settle for boosting stats. You can double your team's roster, remove the umpires, play as a seagull, plant goalposts all around the oval, or simply turn every player into a football. The game does not only change the balance, it rewrites its own rules mid-match.

For purists or for quieter evenings, a Normal Footy mode offers arcade sport with no power-ups at all.

The rest of the package

The sport in question is Australian Rules Football, which is itself good news: it is unusual enough that nobody arrives with reflexes learned elsewhere. The studio says so plainly, knowing nothing about the rules is an advantage rather than a handicap.

On modes, there is local multiplayer on the same couch, online play, and a solo Season mode against the computer with deck-building mechanics: you gain new powers by beating each team. That roguelite graft onto a sports game is a clever idea, because it gives you a reason to keep going alone, something most games of this type badly lack.

The presentation owns its nostalgia for nineties sports games, with pixel-art action and modern smoothness. And the humour is not an idle claim: commentary comes from Broden Kelly of Aunty Donna, alongside David Ashby and Dario Russo, the minds behind the cult series Danger 5 and Italian Spiderman. The whole thing claims a frank Australian identity, which gives it a flavour you will not find in competitors smoothed out for the global market.

What sets the score

The game launched yesterday, developed by Powerbomb Games and Tinker Town, and early feedback is good: Steam reviews are Positive at around 86 percent across some thirty ratings. The sample is still modest, which the score accounts for, but the direction is clear.

The reservations belong to the genre, and they are real. An arcade sports game lives first on human opponents: playing solo against the computer, even with a well-conceived Season mode, the chaos loses half its point since there is nobody left to blame for the seagull. Longevity will therefore depend on the online population and on your address book.

The second point of caution is balance. A hundred and fifty power-ups is a lot, and in a catalogue that size there are always a few that break a match rather than enliven it. The studio will need to tune as the community finds the most unfair combinations.

What remains is the essential thing: this is exactly the sort of game you launch for four people on a couch without explaining anything to anyone, and which ten minutes later produces shouting and accusations. For a descendant of FIFA Street, that is the highest possible compliment. The game is available in French, which does no harm.