Pro Jank Footy is a wild combination of sports and rogue-like that may not always score where it aims
I know very little about Australian Rules Football, but from what I gather it’s a hybrid of soccer, NFL and Rugby. It’s really fast and really violent, and even though I don’t know what’s going on it’s fun to watch the athletes go nuts out there. And this game, Powerbomb & Tinker Town’s Pro Jank Footy, wants us to know that it’s also really weird.
The whole premise of this game is to just get goofy with the sport, to just break it. And it does that, but I’m not sure it’s in a good way. We run left and right on a field, and we shoot to score within the goalposts. That’s basically the gist of the sport. Easy, right?
Pro Jank Footy makes it way more arcade-influenced, adhering to only the very basics of the sport and leaning into drunken, over the top ideas, almost at random. It’s a rogue-like in that it allows us to create modifiers and build up a team (of sorts). We select cards and adjustments before each match, which can be things like changing the speed of our opponents or us, or making the cussing more important. It’s weird, where even stuff like changing advertising affects this game. They’re novel ideas but they don’t work together, and that’s the big rub here. We can make our seemingly decent card selections, but then the opposing team is a team of giants and we’re shrunk down. In fact that was the first randomized team I faced in the game’s season-like mode, and it was easy to get lost in the understanding of what was happening on the screen. Sometimes we can even have a third team show up on the field, causing complete chaos and making playing the actual sport of it a tiny bit of the experience.
It’s fine to be weird, and PJF does a great job at WEIRD, but it doesn’t make any sense at how it gets there. It feels far too randomized, too mis-weighted, and that’s not really all that fun. Controlling our players thereby doesn’t end up feeling great either, because we’re fighting against the anti-sport of it all.
Pro Jank Footy is definitely janky. Janky can be good and funny when it’s an accident, but not really so when it’s on purpose, forcing us into situations that we can’t really get out of. It’s something to see, if we want to see it, but I couldn’t get into it enough to want to keep staring.
This review is based on a Switch code sent to the Editor by the Publisher.
RATING: 2/5
OK
