Game review: Super Shock Football - iPhone / iPod Touch

iPhones and iPods are all the rage these days but in years gone by simple tabletop games were enough to keep youngsters entertained.

When I was a boy in the 70s and 80s my friends and I had such gems as Test Match Cricket and Subbuteo which, with a little imagination, provided excellent representations of our favourite sports.

Over in the US kids about the same age as me got this same basic enjoyment from playing the electronic tabletop version of American football.

The game took place on a metal pitch, with the teams comprising little plastic men. The ball was a little piece of foam.

Each person set out their formations, either attack or defence. An electric motor was then switched on which started the board vibrating. This caused the players to move around in a random, unpredictable manner. The aim of the game was the same as real American football – to move the ball down the field, either by running or by pinging passes from one player to another. As with other games of its time, it required kids to use their imaginations for it to be fun.

This sets the scene for Super Shock Football, a new iPhone/iPod game by Steamroller Studios published by Chillingo.

The new American football season has just got under way, which has led to the inevitable swathe of video game tie-ins.

Big hitters EA and Gameloft have gone down the standard full-on simulation route, releasing Madden NFL 10 and NFL 2010 respectively.

Super Shock Football takes a different approach, attempting to bring the vintage look and feel of the electronic tabletop game into the digital age.

The end result will have Americans drooling over the chance to relive their youth while leaving the vast majority of Brit players out in the cold.

The combination – American football, which is hardly mainstream over here, and a tabletop game no-one will ever have played – is just too obscure for the game to succeed.

That’s not to say the game is badly made. It’s actually very nicely put together.

It has a lovely light-hearted presentation that gives the game a cheery and friendly feel, in line with its aim of appealing to casual players. The sounds and music give the game a suitably razzmatazz atmosphere.

The stadium and little plastic players look authentic enough from what I’ve seen of the tabletop game.

The gameplay too seems to be very true to the original electronic version, but this is where Super Shock Football’s problems begin.

In attack you have a choice of around eight pre-set formations. You can customise them by moving individual players around as your team lines up. When you’re ready the play begins and the players start shuffling about.

You can leave your quarterback with the ball and hope he moves forward or you can attempt a pass by moving and then releasing a small target over your chosen receiver.

This is where your control ends as you have no influence over your players’ movements. In keeping with the original game, players judder about the pitch in a completely haphazard style. Sometimes they move forward while other times they go in the wrong direction, which is very frustrating.

Even more annoying is when a player starts going in the right direction and then reverses back down the pitch.

More irritating still are the drawn-out sequences where you ball carrier spins around on the spot without going anywhere.

It’s a similarly limited and tiresome story when defending. Again there are around eight formations to choose from, which can also be customised. There is little point moving players around because once the play begins they all move randomly anyway. Again there is no control over movement, you just have to hope one of your players tackles an opponent (which seems to be a case of bumping into them).

Super Shock Football scores in terms of offering a simplistic, shallow American football experience without the need for in-depth knowledge of complicated rules and tactics.

But it is so closely related to its subject matter that it soon becomes tedious.

Landing a long pass, scoring a touchdown or breaking up an attack are all things which should be satisfying to achieve in any football game. But in Super Shock it feels like everything is down to luck rather than skill.

It’s a tight conversion of the original tabletop game, so in that sense the developers have achieved what they set out to do. It is refreshing to see a unique concept attempted but it was a flawed idea before it took root.

While flicking a football-shaped piece of foam around a board during a rainy afternoon might have been fun 30 years ago, it doesn’t translate well into a video game.

Electronic American football is a good example of something that is better off left alone.

It’s hard to see a reason why anyone browsing this season’s roster of NFL-inspired games would pick this one over the others.

Verdict: 5 out of 10 – A quaint idea to reinvent an old game but Super Shock Football fails to score a touchdown.