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Kicking off with style.

Super Arcade Football is, yep you guessed it, an arcade football game that has recently launched through Steam’s Early Access program. SAF’s style of football is fast-paced, foul-filled and frantic, making it incredibly exciting for those playing single-player or with friends with the game’s local-multiplayer. With Quick Matches, Preset Tournaments (The World Cup and The Euros) as well as Custom Tournaments, there’s already a fair bit of bang for your buck with more to come as the game continues through development.
Please note: While I will mention what the devs plan to add several times in this review, my overall opinion, and therefore this review, is based entirely on what is currently in the game.
The game’s graphics are simple but suit it well, it’s a bright and colourful game which goes well with the overall feel of the game as a casual arcade game. The UI simply consists of the score and time played of the match in the top left, it doesn’t take up too much screen space so no complaints from me. The menu is also easy to navigate and a basic settings menu is now in place. The settings menu has two audio options and also lets you choose between a landscape or portrait camera. While there’s still a lot of settings which need to be added this is a good start considering it launched with no settings menu at all.
SAF currently features four different modes for playing a match, they are as follows:

Standard mode. A normal eleven-a-side match with a portrait, grass pitch.
Winter wonderland. Eleven-a-side and a portrait pitch but the pitch is made of ice so your players slide around all over the place. It’s good fun but you probably won’t play too much of this.
Indoor Madness. A five-a-side match, this time with a landscape, indoor pitch. Having five players makes the game even more fast-paced than usual and it’s the best way to play the game in my opinion.
Custom Game. This mode has all the options that are currently available in the game and you can choose whichever ones you want.

The three different game modes all have a default time for a half (which is three minutes) but there are a few other options: 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes and No Time Limit (this last one would be for if you wanted to set a score limit). There are other match options now as well, you can choose what pitch surface you want, you can set a score limit, choose between 11-a-side and five-a-side and add modifiers to the game. The game currently has somewhere in the region of forty national teams with plans to bring more national teams as well as European 1st-3rd Division Clubs sometime in the near future. You’ll also be able to edit teams as well as create and share your own, presumably that’ll come with the team management update.
As for the game’s content, there is as I said earlier a fair bit to do, the reason I’ve only played two hours is because of a rare bug. The Tournaments are a lot of fun and the Quick Matches are perfect for killing a few minutes here and there. The general rule for sports games is that there’s a correlation between how much replay value there is and how much you enjoy the game’s sport, the same can be said for this game. SAF’s main appeal in its current state is for picking up to kill some time and while that will probably provide you a fair bit of game time over a long period of time. While the Tournaments are also enjoyable I can’t imagine wanting to play them more than a few times, though you could make them more interesting for yourself by trying to beat them with some of the lesser skilled teams in the game.
Speaking of lesser skilled teams, as you’d expect there are different skill levels of teams (a rating out of five in the game). As far as I can tell, the only thing affected by your team’s skill level is their speed though there may be other things, I’m not sure. Having a lower speed than the team your facing definitely doesn’t make the match impossible but there is a noticeable difference in difficulty.
On to the game’s controls, I haven’t tried M&KB but SAF is great with an Xbox One Controller. The controls are tight and responsive, as you’d want from a fast-paced game, and thankfully the default controls are good seeing as you can’t change them. You move your player with the left thumbstick, switch players with the left bumper, pass/kick with A (the longer you hold A down the harder the kick) and you also have a slow-mo kick with the B button. Holding down the B button lets you control the ball after you’ve kicked it, you’re not going to have it flying around in circles but you can curve it in to the goal which is awesome! It may sound like it makes the game too easy but you can only stay in slow-mo for a certain amount of time (though it’s usually more than enough to go from foot to goal) and goalkeepers move at roughly the same speed as the ball so you still need to be careful with your shots else it’ll just end up in the keeper’s hands.
Circling back to fouls, there’s a hell of a lot of them. This is undoubtedly where the game is weakest and I’m hoping that an option to disable fouls comes about as has been suggested by others in the forum. There are two main problems with fouls. First off, the only kind of tackle is a slide tackle. No big deal at face value but if the slide tackler makes contact with the slide tackleee (is that even a real word?) then a bone snap sound is heard and the player is incapacitated for a few seconds. You can have most of your team wiped out, leaving you defenceless, especially in the Indoor Madness mode, which is rather frustrating. The second problem is a weird one, there are too few foul calls as well as too many. If you’re going to include foul calls from the ref then every foul should be called, though like I said no fouls would be preferable. The thing is with SAF, not all of the fouls are called. This can be incredibly frustrating, especially in situations where your opponents get away with several fouls and you end up getting red carded. Plus, stopping play for a free kick or penalty completely kills the generally fast-paced nature of the game which is one of the best things about it. UPDATE: While fouls do still remain a problem in normal, unchanged game modes, one of the modifiers that has been added is a No Fouls modifier which works well for the 5-a-side games but I’d still like to see something done to fouls so they can be kept on in 11-a-side where they fit in a little more.
Lastly, as I said earlier I’ve only played two and a half hours (at the time of writing this review) due to a bug. The bug makes the game freeze during loading which means you have to force quit and restart to play a new match and it happens every two or three matches. It’s particularly frustrating for Tournaments since you then lose your progress. However, this seems to be a very rare issue as there seems to just be one other person who has complained about it in the forums. UPDATE: It looks like this bug has now been fixed which is awesome! Figured I’d leave this section in since it demonstrates that the devs care about the game due to the issue being fixed reasonably quickly.

Verdict

Super Arcade Football is already a cracking fast-paced, arcade football game, though there’s still a lot that needs to be added. Even in its current state, its well worth the price of admission!
Lone Ranger Reviews.
El K.