Finger Soccer

I'll be straight with you: I cover shooters, not tabletop-inspired sports games. But Finger Soccer landed on my desk and, look, a good local-multiplayer game is a good local-multiplayer game regardless of genre. The core concept is borrowed directly from the old physical button-football toys you'd find at school fairs: you flick to shoot, you time your input, you try to arc the ball past a opponent from midfield. On PC it translates to mouse or input-device flicks, and the feel of that single mechanic is what either sells this to you or doesn't. When it clicks, there's a satisfying snap to a long-range goal. When it doesn't, you're sitting there wondering why a game about flicking needs three attempts to register your input correctly. Right now Finger Soccer is in Early Access, and that label is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The current build ships with single-player challenges, local multiplayer matches, a tournament mode, penalty shootouts, and access to over 30 teams with distinct stats and play styles. On paper that sounds like a reasonable content slate. In practice, the developers have confirmed only two scenarios are available at this stage, which makes the 30-team roster feel more like a wardrobe with nowhere to go. The depth is shallow at launch, and anyone expecting a feature-complete sports game today is going to bounce off this fast. The multiplayer side is where the game has its best argument. Passing a keyboard or controller to a friend and running a penalty shootout is genuinely fun in short bursts, the kind of thing you pull up between rounds of something else. The competitive tension of a well-timed flick beating a diving goalkeeper is real, even if the presentation is rough around the edges. The art style is described by the developers themselves as something they plan to improve, and that honesty is at least refreshing. The AI-generated cover art is a flag worth noting for buyers who care about that sort of thing. It's a pattern across Hard Shark Games' catalog, a studio that has shipped a large number of Early Access titles in a short window, which raises the fair question of how much post-launch polish each title actually receives. The bigger problem for anyone shopping today is the missing online multiplayer. There is no ranked ladder, no online matchmaking, no netcode to evaluate at all. The developers have flagged online multiplayer, leaderboards, and at least ten new stadiums as full-release targets, with the Early Access window estimated at around a year and a half. That's a long time to wait for the feature that would make this worth keeping installed. As a local-only title it competes with free browser games and mobile flick-soccer apps, and that's a hard pitch to make at any price on PC. If you have a reliable couch co-op setup and a very specific nostalgia for button-football toys, you'll get a few evenings of entertainment. Everyone else should wishlist this, check back when online multiplayer ships, and decide then. Fred, Scout Team