Football Heroes Turbo

Genre: Sports (Football)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local, Local Wireless, Online)

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Review:

Football Heroes Turbo is a cartoony, Arcade-style Football game where the players beat each other up for control of the ball, use magical special moves to gain the upper hand, and get cash rewards for making good plays. So if you’re looking for a simulation-style game, this ain’t it.

Okay, so I’m gonna’ level with you guys right now – football ain’t my sport. I have a loose understanding of how the game works, but I haven’t played many games in the genre. So if you’re looking to see how this game compares to the latest Madden game (I mean, clearly it’s nothing like Madden, but still), I am not the right guy to ask. If you’re a die-hard fan of the sport who has played every football game EA Sports, 2K Games, or Sega ever made in the genre… well, you clearly have more experience with the genre than I do. All I can say is my experience with the game and how well I felt it played.

That said… damn, this game is a blast.

Visually, it doesn’t look like much. The characters animate well enough, but the exaggerated cartoony style doesn’t do much for me, and the 2D characters on a low-poly 3D field don’t do much either. At the very least, the game’s sound does a great job of conveying the high-energy, high-impact nature of the sport, and I loved the cacophony of grunts caused when a half a dozen players from each team got into a fistfight (yes, this game has actual fighting, and no fouls are ever called) to try to gain dominance – it really does a great job of selling the feeling of an all-out war for control of the ball.

However, the gameplay here is surprisingly robust. Players select plays before each hike of the ball, can easily swap between players, and have multiple choices of moves with their players both on offense and defense. It’s thrilling when you can find a hole in the opposing defense and sack their quarterback, or manage to juuuuust barely outpace them and score a touchdown.

Plus, as odd as it may sound, the fighting moves add some surprising nuance here – if you’re trying to take the ball into the end zone but have someone hot on your tail, you can always turn around and fight them… but will doing so just let more of their team catch up to you? Do you try to get through the enemy’s defense with punches, go for an all-or-nothing tackle, or try to find a sneakier way around to the back? They’re all viable choices here, and make for some fun strategy among the chaos.

Don’t get me wrong though, there’s plenty of chaos here, and when you do get a group of guys throwing punches at each other in a tight group, there doesn’t seem to be much strategy to be had right there. Ans sometimes, winning a fistfight seems to just come down to who button-mashed the best. It’s still fun, but a little senseless.

The other downside to this game is that while there are plenty of multiplayer options here, they’re all for only two players (one per team – no co-op), and the online mode appears to be empty. Players can still partake in a pretty decent campaign mode though, customizing their team and upgrading or trading off members as they see fit, based both on experience gained as well as funds earned.

Again, this is coming from a football novice, and if others more experienced with the genre want to tell me otherwise, I can’t really refute their arguments, but I found Football Heroes Turbo to be an absolutely delightful surprise, and I feel that while it may not be the Madden game that football fans on the Switch so very dearly want, if you think you might enjoy a more arcadey, less-realistic game of Football, you should absolutely consider Football Heroes Turbo a must-have in your Switch game library.

tl;dr – Football Heroes Turbo is a silly, cartoony, arcadey game of Football that has players getting into fistfights and scoring money for good plays. It is also an absolute blast to play, and while it can get a bit chaotic at times (and the online lobbies are apparently empty), until the Switch sees a port of Madden, this may very well be the best football game on the console.

Grade: B+

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