From conversations with various characters, building decks, and having to make decisions in a football (American Soccer) match, you’ve got a lot to follow.
Football Drama is a lot of different concepts packed into one vaguely sports-themed game.
Playing as Rocco Galliano, you are a manager of a struggling football team called Calchester Assembled Football Club. You have your own issues personally, so hopefully you and the team will grow in the process. You had previously managed football teams, but there was a sudden end to your job, one that you do not wish to dwell on now.
Instead of focusing on how to best manage your team, Football Drama also has a lot of story and character development. When you speak to individuals, you get to choose how you respond and what you say. These tones will change how you are feeling and give you cards that can be used in your football matches. These cards are really important, as you can use them to create a strategy when it comes to the game itself.
Finding out your own story, as well as the story of the team you are trying to manage, is a really interesting aspect of the game, providing for more depth to what would otherwise just be a turn-based game about playing football.
How does that turn-based football work? Instead of controlling the individual players, there are moments when you can make choices about how the team plays as a whole. At the bottom of the screen, there are two large buttons with a smaller deck button in between them. These larger buttons are decisions you can make, depending on how much strain the team has already had, as well as a few other stats along the bottom. These decisions directly affect the match, as does using cards to do something different and change the way the game is being played.
The story behind Football Drama, which delves into romance, drugs, failures, and happiness, is quite an interesting aspect to a sports-based game. The biggest issue for me was understanding the actual turn-based football match. When it came to what the buttons did, how they helped, and what my own personal stats were – I was just lost. This resulted in really long matches that felt repetitious, but I wanted to get through them to make my way back to the story.
The visuals in Football Drama were also really polished, especially when it came to conversations and the football match itself. At the top of the screen, there are some announcers that keep the rounds more interesting, and attention to detail is clearly something the developer took to heart.
I only played a small amount of Football Drama at the Fun and Serious Festival, but I found myself interested and captivated by the story, though much like real life, the football match was lost on me.
Football Drama is available now on Steam.