One of the best things about eFootball Kick-Off is that it has a global championship mode, structured just like a FIFA World Cup, with all the players and nations you could hope for, without it being a World Cup. You can buy this and enjoy all the thrills of The Beautiful Game of football without contributing to the second most egregious use of a sporting event to reputation-wash fascism after the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
I must admit, I find myself following the scores and watching some matches. I only have so many years on the planet, and I love world competition sport, especially both the Olympics and World Cup. But I do feel enormously guilty, as supporting that event means supporting the interests of a truly vile group of malignant arseholes, grifters, white supremacists, warmongers and libertarians running that country. And sadly I’m going to have to go through this moral conflict all over again for the next Olympics.
So at least Konami lets me enjoy the sport, and Kick-Off has a lot going for it. I’ve always preferred Konami’s approach to football over EA’s, and this game gets the core of that down perfectly. Passing the ball is silky smooth. The tactical play is beautifully supported by quality AI, both in attack and defence, and rolling the ball into the net feels so damn good. You would hope so, given that eFootball, as in the engine that powers Kick-Off, has been built and iterated on over five years now, and the base game on other platforms has had a billion downloads in that time. That’s a lot of player data to work on to refine the experience.
It is very refined, and thankfully the Switch 2 game is a cut-price game rather than free to play and loaded with microtransactions. It’s not the most fully featured sports game out there, mind you. There’s the aforementioned world competition, a club mode where you play matches against progressively more difficult teams and earn progressively better players as you win matches, and multiplayer, and that’s it. The features within these modes are also relatively thin. You have got a massive number of teams to customise competitions (I put New Caledonia in the “World Cup” as they actually very nearly qualified and I would have loved to see that, as much as I love New Zealand, who beat them there). Other than that though you can only really mess around with some basic settings and transfer players back and forth from the bench to the starting team.
The game is filled with little qualities that enhance its charm. Practically speaking it runs at a smooth 60fps very consistently, meaning you can fully enjoy the precision of a well-executed play. The visuals are nice and bright without being garish, and my preferred perspective for Konami’s sports games – the behind-the-back camera angle – in particular really carries the atmosphere of the sport. And then your teammates actually provide little emojis to tell you to pass them the ball, get back on defence, and that you’re a crappy ball hog (or emojis to that effect). The emojis can be turned off, but I never found those pop-ups to be distracting or irritatingly frequent, and subtly they did help highlight tactical opportunities as I played.
Multiplayer is smooth and massively enjoyable, too. There’s nothing quite like taking on the world championship, either in co-op, or with each player being the opposition for their other’s teams. The game can be shared over one copy in local multiplayer too, though it’s a little disappointing that it’s not possible to play together online over GameChat, and everyone will need their own copy of the game, but that’s a minor issue in the grand scheme of things.
eFootball Kick-Off is a fairly no-frills take on the sport, in other words, but there’s something very appealing about that. It reminded me of the old N64 sports games, where you’d be content playing season after season, or championship after championship, and then jumping into another with a different team immediately after one is finished.
With clean controls that support pick-up-and-play football, a staggering number of teams, and very moreish gameplay loops, backed by a much lower price tag than its immediate competitor, eFootball Kick-Off is a perfect reminder that while a truly rancid host nation can undermine the delight of a World Cup, nothing can destroy the love for the sport.
