Paid: $2.49, on sale from $4.99.

I played hundreds of hours of Statis Pro Baseball as a kid in the late 1970's, so have a soft spot in my heart for card-based sports games, even though I don't play them any more. I'm also not a huge football fan, but picked this one up on a whim.

I enjoyed goofing around with it a bit. It's easy to play but probably difficult to master as there are multiple levels of strategy that go beyond mere play calling. You can play solo, but it's probably best enjoyed head-to-head (it's supposed to support online friends play, but I didn't test this).

The production values are great, with a clean, consistent and visually appealing art style on the cards, crisp animation throughout, and a cheery sound library that fits the cartoony look. I especially liked the little touch of the players behaving like billiard balls during play action. My only gripe here would be that it's often hard to see exactly who has the ball and where they're going.

It's evident that a lot of care and attention to detail went into making this game, something that is often lacking on "Indie" releases. If you're on the fence about buying this one, I would encourage you to do so for no other reason than to support a developer who obviously cares about quality.

Action Card Football is an unusual premise for a game, being a card battler with a twist, instead of the usual Slay the Spire fantasy dungeon crawl/RNG nightmare, it's an American football (Gridiron) themed game. This might even work for fans of the game, if the quality was any good. The quality isn't any good.

One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.

The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).

Regardless, for all intents and purposes Action Card Football might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Action Card Football didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for run a play for 50 yards, this will happen quickly enough if you play the game seriously for any amount of time, trivial to get, but less than 35 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.

The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

Action Card Football has the farcical price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.

Bought the game expecting to get a few hours play time, but easy to get hooked. Fun game. Worth it