Wild Card Football, out today, is NFL with Hulk mode, UFOs and giant pinball bumpers

rockpapershotgun.com:

I don't have much time for American football, but speaking as somebody who regularly got flattened playing rugby at school, I do have time for sports games in which you can super-size your player and hoof a path through the opposition like you're Godzilla trashing Tokyo. The game in question is Saber Interactive's Wild Card Football, an arcade sporting sim in the spirit of the developer's previous NBA Playgrounds series, which is out today and attracting some buzz on Steam.

It's an NFL-licensed sports sim with a serious and a silly side. On the one hand, you'll unlock and build a team from hundreds of real-world pro players - the headliners include Colin Kaepernick, Walter Payton and Jerry Rice - each with customisable uniforms and a phat sheet of stats for agility, strength, accuracy and so on. There's a single-player Season mode on top of competitive local and online multiplayer with crossplay.

Bread-and-butter stuff for a licensed sports outing. But there's also a Wild Card system, which allows you to summon walls, turn invisible, amplify everybody's stats temporarily, freeze people, and generally speaking literalise any drunk Saturday afternoon daydreams you might have while watching a game on TV.

The visuals lean into this with gently ridiculous, exaggerated player proportions, and playing fields with backdrops that remind me of Two Point Campus. It feels like a project with a dash of Rocket League DNA. Though the most obvious comparison is, of course, Warhammer: Blood Bowl. The latest game in that series didn't do well at release, partly thanks to its microtransactions - according to Saber, Wild Card Football won't feature any in-game purchases, though there's DLC in the works and some predictably