Pro Jank Footy review: slapstick sports sim is as Aussie as meat pie

Pro Jank Footy is a slapstick blast of culture. It’s in your face, hyper-loud and aggressively Australian, with its depiction of Aussie Rules football being a vehicle to get really weird and funny about local sports, culture, and everything in between.

You can play this game as a bog-standard sports simulator. But the real fun of Pro Jank Footy is in its fantasy-infused power-up mode, where rounds of Aussie Rules are changed considerably by light-hearted, magical power-ups that completely change the game and its players – sometimes transforming them into seagulls, making them big or small, or even forcing them to play around the bouncing DVD Video logo (and try to not watch as it hits the corner of the screen).

Forget any idea about winning or losing. Pro Jank Footy is all about the spectacle, and just how silly its world of sports can become as power-ups on power-ups reshape the game.

A rock-solid sports game

Pro Jank Footy is a relatively simple game by nature. There are only a handful of modes here: single player, multiplayer (both with or without power-ups), watch-only, and a light campaign season where players will go through a gauntlet of matches with an ever-growing deck of power-ups.

It never strays far from its primary focus as a slapstick sports simulator, and that focus grants it an elevated sense of humour and fun, as long as you don’t mind how silly the antics can get.

Entering rounds, you’ll pick from an array of preset teams, all of which have decidedly ‘ocker’ styles. There are teams named after snags and chips, as well as native Australian wildlife. There’s no specific team make-up to give you an advantage – just a name and a colour.

Once you’ve picked, you’ll kick off in rounds of footy, using skills of running, tackling and leaping, changing player and collecting power-ups to blast your way across a field and attempt to shoot goals.

At first, Pro Jank Footy takes some getting used to. The game launches with a CRT filter to evoke nostalgia for running games on a classic PC, but you may need to turn this off as it can be a visual eyesore on larger monitors. You’ll also need to contend with goals that are relatively difficult to hit due to the game’s visual field and how your players aim.

But after a few test runs, Pro Jank Footy really flies.

What makes the game most compelling is that while it’s concerned largely with being stupid (to its benefit), it’s also got a rock solid foundation beneath it. Calling to mind classic arcade games, Pro Jank Footy is intuitive and streamlined in approach.

When you get the ball, you simply run at the goals with pauses for stamina and some dribbling. Pay attention to your opponents, as you can dodge and weave around them to avoid their tackles, and then leave a gap to charge up a pass to get further ahead.

Changes to player characters when you’re attempting to intercept the ball are quick and smooth, and there’s a solid system for tackles and other legal on-field attacks as you attempt to save face.

For those players who’ve experienced classic arcade sports games like NBA Jam or the NHL series, there’s a clear inspiration and translation of familiar mechanics. Playing in ‘regular’ mode and competitively with friends, you can still compete as you would in a traditional sports simulator, with a nice balance of difficulty and fairness in scoring or defending goals.

It’s for this reason that Pro Jank Footy‘s wilder moments work so well.

Silliness and spectacle combine in Pro Jank Footy

Working from its traditional arcade gameplay, Pro Jank Footy is made better by stranger layers in its standard versus modes. As mentioned, the primary mode of this game is ridiculous.

You start as usual but this time, there are magical power-ups to define your journey. These impact every part of the experience, including how your players can move, how goals are scored, how distracting the game’s visuals are, what players are on the field, and limitations to your victory.

Power-ups include magic that turns all your players into seagulls, magic to make your players’ legs bigger, everyone becomes a football, fans invade the pitch, kicks are always full power, tackles are harder and take you out for longer, you lose your arms, the DVD Video logo appears, there are no umpires so there’s no rules, players constantly slip over, the ball generates a force field any time it lands… the list goes on.

There are power-ups for introducing special guest players, including Aunty Donna’s Broden Kelly, who also narrates the game with his full chest. There’s a power-up called 100% that sees all calls in the game become Kelly saying ‘100%’ or ‘One Hundo Percent’ in various inflections. You can double the amount of players on the field. You can make all goals – including behinds – worth a full score.

The longer you play, the sillier it becomes because power-ups stack on each other. So you can have a match where some players are small, some are big, some have big legs, some are seagulls, and one of them is your best friend’s dad’s car. Yes, an actual car. It’s really difficult to tackle, and it motors across the field at speed.

When the game devolves in this manner – delightfully, I add – your only thought should be to enjoy the ride. You certainly need to let go of any notion of fair, because those pesky power-ups have a tendency to disrupt any game plan you might think up.

The real fun comes from finding out what happens next. If your players are already seagulls, just how strange can the game get? With more power-ups unlocked for every goal scored, it can get extremely obtuse and surreal quickly. The real spectacle is in seeing how far away from ‘real’ sports you can get.

With that sense of cheeky humour and good fun, Pro Jank Footy is a consistent blast. It’s not the deepest game, but it certainly is one of the most funny I’ve played this year. It derives plenty of charm from its goofiness, and may earn a place in your heart for that reason.

We could all do with more daring, light-hearted and flat-out stupid games. Pro Jank Footy is amongst the best.

A PC code for Pro Jank Footy was provided by the publisher and played for the purposes of this review.

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