FootGoal! Tiki Taka

Genre: Sports (Foosball)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This is included in 4 in 1 Bundle, along with Burn! SuperTrucks, Pure Chase 80’s, and Sportitions’24. It is also included in 4 in 1 Bundle Creative Puzzles & Table Football, along with #womenUp Super Puzzles Dream, #Xmas Super Puzzles Dream, and Merry Christmas Snowball Bubble.)

FootGoal! Tiki Taka, released on Nintendo Switch in 2020, is a videogame that seeks to simulate the experience of playing Foosball, that tabletop game you’d see in bars, arcades, and other entertainment venues, where two players control a color-coded team of players on what is more or less a Soccer field using rods strewn throughout the table.

The presentation here is pretty terrible, with simple 3D graphics, blurry textures, no music, and with unrealistic tapping sounds when your players “kick” the ball. Probably about the only good element of the presentation is the over-enthusiastic “Goal!” announcement you get every time a goal is scored, amusing in part because of how subdued and quiet the rest of the game is.

When it comes to the gameplay, the entire game is controlled using the left analog stick. Depending on the camera angle, you’ll push it one direction to move all of your players left or right on the field, and another to have them kick backwards or forwards. Players cannot opt to have the kicking done with a different control input, they can’t choose to move one row of players independent of the others… that’s it.

I suppose at the very least FootGoal! Tiki Taka works, in that it does the absolute bare minimum needed to make a videogame based on Foosball. Unfortunately, it has nothing in the way of options, limits players’ control inputs, and packages it within a terrible presentation. Even for a game as simple as Foosball, you would hope for something more than this. If you’re craving Foosball, just take my advice and go play the real thing, you’ll have a much better time.

tl;dr – FootGoal! Is a game that seeks to replicate the experience of playing Foosball. It works, but not especially well – Foosball is a shallow game to begin with, and FootGoal! Adds to that a limited control scheme, a lack of options, and a bad presentation. You’re better off finding a place to play the real thing than you are playing this.

Grade: D

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