I don’t watch football, I don’t play FIFA and honestly I don’t play football in real life these days. But I used to and I always enjoyed it. Football was exciting! All that running around, kicking balls and scoring goals!

That’s what happens in FIFA too, right? But I feel like it does an awful job at representing what it’s actually like to play football. It’s slow paced, matches feel like they go on forever and often end with low scores. For me, it feels more like watching professional football than playing football. It’s more of a game for people that follow football than people who want to enjoy playing football.

It’s a shame then that nobody talks about other football games, but there are actually plenty out there that are a blast to play. Let’s take a look at some of them!

Behold The Kickmen

This was one of the games that inspired this article in the first place. Behold the Kickmen even markets itself as a game for people who don’t like football. It’s a top down football game with a very arcadey gameplay style. Teams are small and matches only last a few minutes. But there’s actually quite a bit of substance to the game.

There’s a well presented story that’ll no doubt make you laugh a lot. And the gameplay is very engaging. It’s similar to an RPG in that you start off without any skills and your players’ stats are all low.

After every match you get to choose a new skill and then put the money you’ve earned into upgrading your team’s five different stats. That money is earned by building up combos during play. Every time you pass or tackle it builds up your combo meter and you’ve got to score before losing the ball or you won’t earn any money from it.

Everything in this game is presented somewhat as a joke. It’s very tongue-in-cheek, with team names being riffs on existing teams and the mechanics make a joke out of things like the offside rule, which happens at random and forces you to one side of the pitch or you get a red card.

But at the end of the day, it’s a blast! It’s quick and exciting and there’s a sense of progression as you play. It captures the fun of football perfectly.

Rocket League

Ok ok I know, this isn’t really football. There aren’t even any feet for god’s sake. But I feel like Rocket League still captures the essence of football quite well. It’s got all the basics like doing all you can to get the ball into the goal.

While it’s not quite the same it still feels like playing football but with a lot more energy. That should come as no surprise as the cars you play as are all outfitted with rockets that let them boost for extra speed on the ground or even use that same boost to fly into the air to whack that ball through the sky!

Captain Tsubasa

Right, let’s talk about a football game that actually is football. Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champion was the second game I knew had to make this list. It’s based on an anime of the same name but don’t let that dissuade you. The game’s perfectly enjoyable without having watched it.

This one’s a bit more serious than Behold the Kickmen but it’s not exactly a football sim. Team’s actually have 11 players and it looks like a cel shaded FIFA rather than having a top down presentation. It plays slightly like FIFA too where you pass and tackle and all that but with a little bit of over the top anime flair.

For example, you tackle by shoulder bashing the other player and you have a charge meter for your shots. Fill it all the way up and you’ll do a power shot where the camera zooms in to follow the ball, it glows blue and your striker does a fancy ass backflip to add extra power to the shot!

So yeah it’s kinda silly too but it’s so much fun! It kind of captures that childlike fun of kicking the ball as hard as you can and exaggerates it massively while also adding some drama to the game, as you never know if the keeper’s going to pull of some similarly OTT move to stop the ball at the last second.

That highlights one of the games mechanics too. Keepers don’t save a ball based purely on their skill. Rather they have a stamina meter. Bigger shots will drain it quicker and the lower it is, the easier it is to get a ball past them. This encourages a more aggressive and fast paced style of play.

Captain Tsubasa also has a big focus on story. As I said, it’s based on an anime and you play as the main character from it as he and his team make their way to the world cup. The story is decently presented but you could skip it if you just want to play the game. It focuses a lot on his relationship with his team members and opponents and such. Overall it isn’t bad and it brings something more to the table than just straight up football action.

Mario Strikers Charged

So Mario Strikers Charged is a game I just never got around to playing. I always heard it was good but there was always something more interesting to play instead. I don’t blame people for choosing Strikers though, it looks fantastic in trailers. It’s got Mario characters in a dark gritty art style, items to use mid match like in Mario Kart and arcadey gameplay that I love so much.

Unfortunately, it is completely uninteresting to play. This was one hell of a surprise to me. At first I thought maybe just the early stages were too easy and that’s why I wasn’t enjoying but I kept playing and kept not enjoying it. There are a lot of games I don’t like playing but I don’t think I’ve ever played one that actually bored me this much. It wasn’t infuriatingly bad like some shovelware game, but there’s just nothing there to make me want to play more.

The graphics are decent, I’ll give it that but everything is so dark and flat. Nothing pops out at you, it’s just there. And the music is the same. It’s not ear gratingly awful but I can’t remember a single tune, even after looking them up on youtube. They just disappeared from my memory as soon as I heard them.

I’ll talk a little more about the gameplay here too. It’s played from a top down perspective and there are only 4 players to a team. As such the pitches are fairly small and it only takes a couple of seconds to get from one end to the other. They’ve also got different stage hazards like rocks falling from the sky or lightning striking at random. They almost never got in the way though and sort of just seemed to happen without affecting much.

The game’s quite easy to play. You’ve got a button for passing, one for a long pass, one to shoot and one to tackle. They work about as you’d expect. You can hold down the shoot button to charge up your shot and if the star player has the ball they can do a mega shot or something. You press the button and this meter pops up. Press the button at the right time and you can kick a multitude of balls into the goal. This is accompanied by an “epic” cutscene of course that plays every single time. In my experience this is far and away the best way to win. The AI goalie never seemed to be able to block more than 2 most of the time, and blocking them yourself is way too easy.

When an opponent does their super duper shot you go into a first person mode where balls appear on the screen and you point your wiimote at them and press A to block them. It’s really not all that hard since they only come one at a time but I’d usually miss one or two due to the hit box on them being smaller than the ball itself.

Um, what else is there? There’s a story in the game. When you pick a character and create a team you get a short paragraph about how they really want to win the next tournament in between matches.

Oh and there are items! Mushrooms that make you huge for a few seconds or red shells that knock an opponent out for a bit. But I have no idea how to get them and most of the time I had an item I didn’t even realise. Worse than that, when I used them it made little difference since matches are pretty damn easy. There’s no limit to how many times you do those ultra mega goal shots and they’re very easy to pull off. And did I mention that when you score a goal you don’t even get a fanfare? It’s a foghorn. What the hell? Why would you want that sound to play when you score a goal? Here’s a link to a compilation of Mega Strike goals. This sums up the game better than I can because that’s 90% of what you’ll be doing, with the same cutscene and the same almost metal guitar riff every single time.

It is worth noting though, that Mario Strikers was well received by reviewers and players. I certainly didn’t enjoy it but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth a try if it looks like something you’d like.

Let’s talk about a game I did like though!

FIFA Street 2

Just like Mario Strikers, FIFA Street is one of those games I kept meaning to get around to when it first came out all those years ago. Now that I have finally played it, I find myself wishing I had played it years ago. This game is an absolute blast!

FIFA Street is FIFA but instead of professional players in world renowned stadiums it’s just a bunch of lads in a car park with makeshift goals. To me this is so much more interesting than regular FIFA. Not only does it evoke the feeling of playing football with friends on the street outside my house, it allows for mechanical variety too.

Some of the “pitches” you play on are wide and short, like the one in a car park. But then there are some that are much longer and narrower. I like how this mixes things up and encourages you to play differently in each match. Strategies that would work in a wide play area sometimes aren’t viable in a narrow space and you have to adapt to your surroundings.

The core gameplay is also very different from any kind of pro football game. Doing tricks with the ball, like kicking it over a player’s head or through their legs while doing some fancy footwork, is heavily encouraged. Successfully doing tricks builds up a meter that makes your shots more powerful and when full, allows you to enter “gamebreaker” mode. In this state you have a limited time to combo your tricks together. The more you do, the more points your next goal is worth. So often a match can become about getting to “gamebreaker” mode and scoring one goal that’ll put you way in the lead.

Sometimes scoring goals won’t even win you the match. Rather than playing through a league or tournament, you choose from a range of matches split into groups that focus on different win conditions. You might have to score a certain amount of goals in a time limit, get a certain amount of trick points or get a five point lead on your opponent for example. I like how this keeps things varied. You’re never just playing a million samey matches in a row. The later matches are locked until you complete a certain amount of challenges. This might sound annoying but it adds to the feeling of progress when you unlock the next ones and forcing you into matches focused on gaining trick points makes you engage with all of the game’s mechanics.

Winning those matches grants you Skill Bills that can then be spent new customisation options or even skill upgrades for your created character. All of a sudden it sounds like I’m talking about an RPG and I think that’s a big part of why I liked FIFA Street. You create your own character and start out with barely any skill points and a few basic tricks.

As you play more and win more, you unlock more tricks and choose which areas to level your character up. It’s nice that you get that choice as it allows you to experiment with different playstyles. You might want to focus on your attack or speed skills. Once you’ve levelled up enough you even get to form your own party and adventure across the world!

Or rather, you get to start your own team and play matches in different countries. Actually this is the most interesting part of the game for sure. It feels like such a big step forward when you get to skill level 40 and you don’t have to play with the random NPCs the game picks for every match. It’s so much more engaging when it’s your very own team. You even get to customise your home pitch. I made mine the yard behind some abandoned buildings.

Overall FIFA Street was the most surprising game on this list for me. It’s exactly what I was looking for; a game that made me feel just like I did when I used to play with my friends in real life. Trying to look cool doing tricks and blasting the ball as hard as I could into the net, even if it meant kicking it over the fence more often than not.