Brutal Sports Football

The Good
Brutal Sports Football is not so much soccer or American football but rather a rugby-style game. The setting is the mid-21st century, and genetically-engineered warrior-freaks play this half-rugby, half-battle game in a football-style arena. Each game is just seven minutes in length, but a lot can happen in that time. Like most games you want to score more goals than the opponent, but you can also win whatever the score if you can decapitate six players from the other team! If the game ends in a tie, you play "sudden death", and it is exactly that; the first team to literally kill off the other wins. Vicious! To gain possession you tackle, kick or punch the opponent, often maiming him in the process. To add some spice to the game, icons for power-ups such as extra speed, bombs, or even swords (!) are scattered on the field. Yes, you can stomp on an opponent, blow him up with a bomb, or even lop off his head - and the game is not shy about showing plenty of spurting blood. By halfway through a game, the field is littered with bomb craters, corpses, and severed heads!

The Bad
The players are large colourful sprites. They look okay, but the animation is very choppy: for example, when they run, it looks as though they're using perhaps two or three frames of animation, giving the game a very clunky look. The playfield and the stadium are nicely detailed, but they still look rather flat. The controls, although simple, are a tad sloppy too. I find that when the football is free, it's a bit difficult to judge the exact position of your feet as you try to run over the ball and scoop it up. Perhaps the most annoying aspect is that the 'pause' feature seems very slow to react; you need to press and hold the button for a half-second or so before the game finally reacts and stops.

The Bottom Line
The game is a good deal of fun to play for one player against the CPU, but it becomes outstanding when you go 2-player against a friend. Overall I recommend Brutal Sports Football. It's a good game with some flaws.

The Good
The sheer level of gore is good for a laugh, including the stains left on the pitch form blood and mud. There are some neat subtleties to the gameplay. Passing, kicking and running can all come in handy, making this quite balanced.

The extras on the pitch are neat - I especially liked the bunnies and tortoises you can run over to gain their respective speeds. The 'injury time' bit is neat as well.

The Bad
The knockout mode is embarrassingly easy - I won it at my second attempt, although both finals (I lost the first) were quite close. The player-improvement screen is complicated to understand at first, and the difficulty curve through the leagues is a little unbalanced. You could argue that the blood and guts are something of a gimmick, and once you remove two key opponents (the goalkeeper and the central player who goes for the restarts) it becomes much easier. At 7 minutes the matches are a bit too long.

Speedball 2 is essentially a better game though - more focused, more original ideas (such as the score-multiplier and stars on the wall) and a more futuristic look.

The Bottom Line
A combination of ideas from numerous different sports, particularly Australian Rules Football, with a smattering of violence and gore. The action takes place on a field with 10-metre markings similar to American football, and is viewed side-on, and at times the best approach is to work on attacking the opposition early on in the match, and making use of the vacant space to score more later on.

The Good
The ability to decapitate the oppenents adds a very comical touch to the game. Once you have decapited an oppenent you can even kick their head around the field. The sound as you crush an oppenent with a tackle is also very funny with suitable bone grinding crunches. There are weapons such as swords and bombs you can pick up and power ups and downs which add a bit of variety to the carnage.

The Bad
Bit easy to score against cpu, passing doesn't really come into it as you just need to run from one end of the field to the other.

The Bottom Line
A weird mix of all kinds of football - American, Aussie rules, rugby, soccer all blended into one. Comical in the extreme. Reminds me of the Speedball games but gameplay is not as frantic as in those games and much gorier.