This is a sports game. A fantasy sports game based loosely around dodgeball, basketball and ice hockey. It was an old school hit from the days of the Amiga and was one of the titles responsible for putting the Bitmap Brothers on the map. it’s been re released by Mastertronic and has been put together for them by Tower Studios, Livid games and the Bitmap Brothers themselves.
I played and to a certain extent enjoyed the original with friends back as a teenager, many happy memories have i of those days of yore. sadly bringing it back after all these years is like cloning king Arthur and the knights of the round table and then sending them to fight the Taliban in Helmand province with predictably disastrous results.
The game sees you creating and managing your team of Speedball players through their careers in this “sport of the future” you can also play against a friend or try the “”multiplayer”” in double quotation marks because it is local multiplayer only? i mean really in this day and age they haven’t bothered with online multiplayer? that could have been it’s saving grace. there is also a quick play mode and a challenge mode.
The management side is fairly limited you can transfer players and hire star players from the scout report ,also you can spend your winnings on upgrading your team’s stats but it’s a rather fiddly business.
So what does the actual game entail? well you have two teams throwing a steel ball around trying to score points in a number of ways either by scoring goals or hitting stars and transporter tubes and this odd little pinball style accelerator that can throw the ball deep into the other teams side. this game is essentially the same as the original but it doesn’t seem to play as well as the original. I can see it would be better played with a 360 controller that might make your experience passable but if you were going to try it with a keyboard you wont have much fun essentially you have direction control and one action button luckily they are rebind-able but still you are just steering the sprites and tapping enter at appropriate moments to switch players, to throw, to tackle….?? I tell a lie there is also a back button which you will use a lot. there is no such thing as a rage quit in this game only an apathy quit.
I expect that with a decent “joy pad” you could probably have some rambunctious fun with the two player mode. but then you might find the original played on an Amiga emulator was faster and more nostalgic. playing through the career mode will be fairly easy though the AI is a little bit predictable and that would have been a no brainer as something that needed to be updated. the sprites also have not been updated enough. pixely sprites set against a higher resolution arena floor jars my immersion a little bit, in the same way as adding value cola to a fine old single malt whiskey would.
I would have liked to have seen some story and lore elements added rarely will i say this game could use some cut scenes, but this game could. People expect more immersion these days than we did in the 1990s. A real online multiplayer would have also helped to build some flavour into it. Real leagues could have been organised and real world Speedball stars could have risen to the top and created some fan drama and replayability. this game needed to have more to it and it doesn’t.
Well I have best draw this to a close as i already feel like i have just sent the cast of Sesame Street to an extermination camp.
Should you or anyone else buy it ? If you are an older gamer and want to put a few quid in the Bitmap Brothers pocket as a thank you for teenage goodtimes? then yes if this tweaks your nostalgia then it couldn’t hurt. Young gamers however should not, they should just know that this game was legendary back in the day. I don’t think younger gamers will know what to make of this at all. I think they will find that clicking one button to do everything whilst staggering about in four directions is an pitiful level of control involvement.
The best thing about this is the game of Speedball itself. It’s a fun little sports game. this version just hasn’t been worked on enough though sadly.
Speedball 2 HD gets a 2.
One point for being Speedball 2 HD and another point for being speedball (lest we forget).
Right! im off to my study now to arrange my affairs, take a drink of scotch and a cigar and then im going to blow my brains out with my army revolver.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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