The UFO 50 Diaries: Kick Club

[insert football pun here]

At some point I’m going to have to reckon with how viscerally negative my reaction to anything even vaguely football related is. I do not care for the sport, to the degree that I can’t even feign interest for the purposes of exchanging pleasantries with the people I work with.

It’s not even any particular moral or intellectual tirade against the sport itself. Any criticism of professional football I can divorce largely from the technical skills required to excel at it, and the toxicity around its fandom is something I largely believe would exist elsewhere if this vessel for it did not exist.

This disinterest extends to videogames, in the sense that any football related interactive experience just makes my mind wander and my dick shrivel.

Thankfully Kick Club is not a football game, despite what it may seem.

A beautifully simple action platformer with a singularly satisfying means of progression, Kick Club is a cathartic experience to engage with. The act of booting a ball into an enemy’s face is unparalleled, there’s a sophisticated intuitiveness to how you measure that particular trajectory that meant that I very rarely missed whenever I launched a volley in one direction or another.

But there’s a secondary element to Kick Club that makes it worthy of note too. It’s not just about kicking a ball. The ball is an entity unto itself, a physical object in the world and not just a projectile. But it is also a projectile, and subject to the whims of the player in a surprising number of ways.

Kick Club has been, for me, a game about discovering things I didn’t know I could do. The slide tackle. Crouching to avoid projectiles. Charging your kick to absolutely wallop the ball around each arena. None of which you actually need to best the obstacles in your path but each one a vital stepping stone towards the kind of mastery we’ve come to know and love from this collection.

Kick Club’s progression is a funny thing. Each arena is a fixed, finite experience, one you will no doubt encounter time and time again. In this regard it’s following on the design principles of earlier games, where mastery of the game itself is a means of self preservation as much as it is a way to feel incredibly cool punting a ball about.

But this is a double edged sword, because once you know you can get through a good half dozen levels completely unscathed, you start to unravel all the faster when you do inevitably fuck up. There have been runs I’ve attempted where I’ve just hard reset seconds into the first arena because I got clipped by a wayward ball, even though there was ample room to turn the endeavour around. It’s a bugger like that, this type of game. A thing that doesn’t even demand perfection, but you do.

All in all a really fun, engaging and surprisingly deep little action game that ticks all the right boxes.