Wild Card Football Review
thesixthaxis.comMadden’s stranglehold on the digital rendition of American Football has been near-complete for several years, but 2023 has seen the arrival of an impressive array of indie offerings that are willing to offer a different view of gridiron. After Retro Bowl and Legend Bowl gave us a pack of 16-bit pixel-art plays, Wild Card Football is here to return us to the NFL Blitz era, making American Football games fun again. It does a pretty good job of it too.
Wild Card Football is essentially a spiritual successor to arcade-styled games like NFL Street and NFL Blitz, with trimmed down teams going head-to-head in overly brutal ways. Rather than real world teams facing off, each squad is headed up by that team’s star quarterback, so you get Team Purdy and Team Cousins rather than the 49ers and the Vikings. Each of your heroes is represented here – this might be the most any Jets fans see of Aaron Rodgers this year – but in essence these are the teams you know and love by another name, so Purdy is still going to hand it off to McCaffrey and cause your opponents untold pain. Hooray!
You can immediately tell this isn’t your average game of gridiron thanks to the hyper-stylised art style that have been chosen for each player. They’re even chunkier than they are in real life, and they’re kinda loveable too. At the very least they look as though they can take a hit or two, and there will definitely be some major collisions coming their way.
Wild Card Football feels wonderfully brutal. Every tackle, every stiff arm, feels as though its an earth-shattering connection, and some of these players will be spiked, suplexed or slammed multiple times in the course of a game. While that might be par for the course for Kirk Cousins, it’s liable to
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