Fun game!

It gives me the same vibes as the old Mario Tennis for Game Boy Color, which is great! Probably because of the mix of sports and rpg and a not so "serious" take on the game but without making it full of shenanigans either. It's a simpler football game with rpg mechanics.

After having played the first season, these are my takeaways.

What I liked:
- Sports + RPG is great and scratches an itch
- Customization options are cool without being game-breaking
- Dialogues are genuinely fun/interesting
- Each town/city feels unique, even though they have a "simple" design, it feels good.
- Having a local pub with supporters is great stuff, maybe can have more mechanics?
- The story mode quests are fun to follow and rewarding!

What I didn't like as much:
- Playing with a PS5 controller in Steam Deck, it didn't recognize the R1 button, not sure why.
- Using the same button for passing and changing players while defending makes it frustrating when you suddenly have the ball and pass to no one. It would be great to have a button just for this, like L1 or R1.
- Passing is very frustrating, using the default settings for controllers, maybe cause you start with crap ass players but a lot of passes miss that feel they shouldn't, like situations with no pressure, etc
- For the first season it feels that there's a lot of downtime in story/quests, and when you get one, you get a lot of improvements at once. Maybe they could be more spread?
- I would love a way to improve your team mates skills as well.

Overall, solid fun game. hope to see more stuff from the dev!

How I found the game: from one of the indie dev subreddits

Fabulous little football game with an obvious nod to SWOS that takes me back to my Amiga 500 days.

( full review with screenshots: https://www.gaming-parrot.com/post/bang-average-football-review-above-the-mean )

Bang Average Football is a retro arcade soccer/football game that's mostly focused on the RPG-esque story mode. This follows a relatively standard plot about taking the worst team in the bottom league all the way to the top, but with more focus on the management side than you typically get from indie games. It doesn't have quite the same level of over the top humor or any special abilities at all, but the presentation and mood overall remind me of something like Inazuma Eleven.

You start out as a player with a 6/10 rating in all 6 stats and the option to play in any position. Completing drills and challenges will earn you stat points, so practice makes you better in more ways than one. I really like this approach in theory, but by starting you at 6/10 and providing so many points early on, your player will rapidly outclass everyone else in your league and will likely stay that way until you play the secret endgame team. This was possibly meant to balance out that your starting teammates are garbage and you don't unlock transfers until the second season, but at least in normal mode, it wasn't nearly enough to make the AI teams competitive. I had one loss across the 43 games it took me to win all three leagues and beat the final team, and even draws were pretty rare once I got used to the controls and found better teammates. The passing controls aren't terribly accurate, so having a fast striker who can hold on to the ball is far and away the most reliable way of scoring.

When you're not playing matches, you eventually have access to a fairly wide variety of management tools. There's a transfer market where you can buy and sell players from any team you've already played, a tactics interface that lets you position all of your players with separate settings for with and without the ball, some very light sponsor and stadium management, and equally light instructions on pressing and aggressiveness that you can give before starting a game. It all works pretty well, although for the most part you can stick with one lineup and set of instructions for just about every game. I only really made changes when I was playing a team with a particularly dramatic stats advantage. Transfers are also a little weird because you're required to have 14 players, but since there's no stamina or injury systems, I'm not sure why you'd ever substitute a player. It seems ideal to immediately sell down to 14 and then have your best 11 and three stooges who cost as little as possible. Possibly the three extra players are intended to cover you in case of red cards, but it's trivial to avoid those by not using the slide tackle command.

That leaves the story, which is fun. You basically get a short chapter where you travel to another town, solve some silly problems, and boost your stats a bunch from training drills. These take 20-30 minutes each and are fairly entertaining. The highlight for me was that they add some character to some of the teams you'll be facing in that league, which helps keep the season more interesting. I wish they'd gone further with this, say by providing towns for more teams and letting you find secret players, etc, there, but even as it is it's a fun system.

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