Behold the Kickmen

My Saturday night co-op crew will never forgive me for recommending this one, and here is why: Behold the Kickmen is ruthlessly, defiantly solo. No split-screen, no online, no local co-op of any kind. The developer made that call on purpose and is not sorry about it. So if your usual criteria is "fun for four friends," turn around now. For everyone else who wants a weird, short, and surprisingly charming arcade football game with jokes baked into every pixel, read on. The pitch here is circular rather than rectangular. Goals score more points the further away you shoot from. The "goldkeepers" behave like they have somewhere else to be. The offside rule triggers on a timer and automatically sends players off, which is either the funniest parody of football's most misunderstood rule or just broken, depending on your mood. You control one player at a time, cycling through your squad while building a combo meter through tackles, passes, and charged shots. That combo meter is the real mechanical hook: earning money for upgrades requires style, not just wins. Chain a couple of passes, time a precision tackle, then slot a charged hyper-curve into the top corner and the game erupts with confetti and a referee giving your player a little kiss. Abilities like dashing, aftertouch, and advanced tackling unlock progressively through the story mode, though an "Ultimate" mode hands you everything from the start if you want it. The writing is where Kickmen earns its reputation. The story follows your player's rise through the leagues while a melodramatic rivalry with a bully from Brazil United slowly turns into something stranger. Between matches, dialogue scenes are packed with deliberately clunky phrasing and affectionate absurdity. The humor is the kind that either lands immediately or leaves you cold, and critics were genuinely split on whether poking fun at football culture is witty or just a bit smug. Steam users landed firmly on the positive side, with an 85% approval rating from several hundred reviews, even if the Metacritic score sits in mixed territory at 58. The honest complaints are real though. Passing direction is unreliable when the game speeds up. Switching to the right teammate mid-match can feel like the game is picking for you rather than responding to your input. The AI swings between dopey and brutal with no obvious logic. None of that is game-breaking at the pace of the early campaign, but it stacks up in later, faster matches in a way that feels less like intentional chaos and more like loose ends. The campaign runs roughly four hours, which is about right for the concept. If you hate football, this is your game. If you love football, you might find it mean-spirited, or you might find it cathartic. Either way it is a single-player-only, sub-five-dollar time capsule of a very specific indie dev's disdain for a very popular sport, and it is absolutely more fun than it has any right to be.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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