![]() It has a whole lot of heart - more than the big budget NFL titles. It’s under a fiver! At £4.49 / $4.99, it’s an absolute steal, and a perfect pick-up for Super Bowl weekend, when NFL fever grips many of us fiercely. However Retro Bowl remains excellent - addictive, thrilling, and the perfect sort of game to keep on your Switch for quick-fire time killing. It has a 16-bit aesthetic and is a PC-first release, which means it comes with more complicated wrinkles and some more realistic presentation. Of the recent retro revivals, it’s fair to say that Legend Bowl, the PC title I wrote about as a Madden Killer recently, is the more potent. Between seasons you can even jump between teams, taking offers to go to a crappy team to elevate them with your management and play-calling skills. You’ll need to juggle injuries, upset players, salary caps, and more. It’s a very light coach and team management layer, basically.Īs a sort of combined Head Coach and General Manager you’re given the ability to hire, fire, draft, trade, and even upgrade your facilities to keep fans and your players happy and healthy. I like that bit just a little bit less - but it does make matches thrilling.Īs well as the simple yet sublime feel of dropping back as a quarterback and nailing pixel-perfect threaded passes, the game also features some off-the-field action to string together the games. It even - slightly frustratingly - appears to feature the aggressive rubber-banding that defined the era, where if you get too far ahead your opponent will suddenly really turn on the gas. It takes about two seconds to understand. It controls smoothly, with the sort of snappiness that defined many arcade sports games of that 80s/90s era. ![]() The whole reason this game works is because of the pure simplicity of its play. All of the mechanics that helped it to do so have been lovingly reproduced on Switch with actual button-based controls rather than touch screen stuff. When I was sitting hungover on an airport floor, awaiting a rescue flight home, Retro Bowl kept me sane. When I fell in love with it in 2020, it was when I almost got trapped in a foreign country as the pandemic suddenly forced borders to slam shut. ![]() It’s a single-player only affair, something designed to be played to kill time on your own. It has easy to grapple controls that let you perform the basic actions of American Football, and streamlines the game down to just the offensive side of the ball - defense is played by AI. And now, Retro Bowl is newly out on Switch. Retro Bowl’s 8-bit aesthetic means that it’s more simple than Blitz, yes - but the heart is there, the energy. I wrote about Retro Bowl back in 2020, describing it as carrying “the spirit of Blitz” - that is, NFL Blitz, one of the greatest sports games ever made. One such revival that’s held my attention for quite some time is Retro Bowl, which up until now has been a mobile-exclusive, 8-bit inspired NFL experience that is functionally quite similar to the likes of NES classic Tecmo Bowl. I keep falling for retro revivals instead. But despite loving American Football, I just… struggle to care. That company slaves away to put out Madden yearly, and spends many millions in the process.
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