Bang Average Football is a retro arcade soccer/football game that’s mostly focused on the RPG-esque story mode. This follows a relatively standard plot about taking the worst team in the bottom league all the way to the top, but with more focus on the management side than you typically get from indie games. It doesn’t have quite the same level of over the top humor or any special abilities at all, but the presentation and mood overall remind me of something like Inazuma Eleven.
You start out as a player with a 6/10 rating in all 6 stats and the option to play in any position. Completing drills and challenges will earn you stat points, so practice makes you better in more ways than one. I really like this approach in theory, but by starting you at 6/10 and providing so many points early on, your player will rapidly outclass everyone else in your league and will likely stay that way until you play the secret endgame team. This was possibly meant to balance out that your starting teammates are garbage and you don’t unlock transfers until the second season, but at least in normal mode, it wasn’t nearly enough to make the AI teams competitive. I had one loss across the 43 games it took me to win all three leagues and beat the final team, and even draws were pretty rare once I got used to the controls and found better teammates. The passing controls aren’t terribly accurate, so having a fast striker who can hold on to the ball is far and away the most reliable way of scoring.
When you’re not playing matches, you eventually have access to a fairly wide variety of management tools. There’s a transfer market where you can buy and sell players from any team you’ve already played, a tactics interface that lets you position all of your players with separate settings for with and without the ball, some very light sponsor and stadium management, and equally light instructions on pressing and aggressiveness that you can give before starting a game. It all works pretty well, although for the most part you can stick with one lineup and set of instructions for just about every game. I only really made changes when I was playing a team with a particularly dramatic stats advantage. Transfers are also a little weird because you’re required to have 14 players, but since there’s no stamina or injury systems, I’m not sure why you’d ever substitute a player. It seems ideal to immediately sell down to 14 and then have your best 11 and three stooges who cost as little as possible. Possibly the three extra players are intended to cover you in case of red cards, but it’s trivial to avoid those by not using the slide tackle command.
That leaves the story, which is fun. You basically get a short chapter where you travel to another town, solve some silly problems, and boost your stats a bunch from training drills. These take 20-30 minutes each and are fairly entertaining. The highlight for me was that they add some character to some of the teams you’ll be facing in that league, which helps keep the season more interesting. I wish they’d gone further with this, say by providing towns for more teams and letting you find secret players, etc, there, but even as it is it’s a fun system.
Overall, I had a great time with Bang Average Football. It’s far too easy on normal, but even so it was fun to storm through all the leagues while listening to an audiobook. As long as you’re not coming into it looking for anything particularly deep or serious, I think you’ll have a good time. Hard more might be the answer for anyone looking for more of a challenge, but if you’re after deep management, this probably isn’t for you.
Rating: 80%
Time to beat: 7 hours to do pretty much everything
MSRP: $12
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041