The Amiga was home to a whole host of exceptional games in its time, but not all of them earned the right to be called true classics, even if they were innovative for their time.
Advancements not only in visuals but also gameplay design have left some old school retro “classics” as interesting curios to look at, but not exactly games you can recommend others play.
Bitmap Brothers’ Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe is amongst a smaller group of Amiga classics that defy that kind of thinking, because its take on a mix of soccer, rollerball, and outright violence is just as fun and just as playable in 2026 as it ever was. The simple visual style helps here, but so too does its very simple control scheme, built around a one-button joystick because that was all the Bitmaps had to work with.
Over the years there’s been a number of Speedball 2 clones – I’m probably the only person who still remembers titles like Dead Ball Zone for the PS1 for example – as well as direct sequels, those these have tended towards the truly awful. Yes, Speedball 2100, I’m looking RIGHT at you. I do not forget, and I do not forgive.
Every few years Speedball gets revisited either in an homage game, or if a given publisher wants to cough up the rights to the name and release a “fresh” version.
2026’s take comes to us from Rebellion Software, and it’s simply called Speedball.
Just Speedball even though my count it could equally be called at least Speedball 6. As every Speedball 2 sequel has done, it promises a fresh take and modern style while keeping to the sport’s retro-futuristic roots.
The core game premise is still the same as it ever was; two teams, a goal at each end of the pitch and a murderous desire from your players to score more points than the opposition while also cracking their skulls in within a contained arena full of hazards, bonus point scoring opportunities and (of course) the far-away voice of a vendor trying to sell ice cream. It absolutely wouldn’t be a Speedball game without the ice cream seller.
As you might expect, the visuals are a little more intense and nuanced than the Bitmap Brothers could manage back in the late 1980s.
However, the biggest change here isn’t upgraded visuals, but instead a shift to a more complex button scheme. Where Speedball and Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe used a single button joystick contextually and in a very slick way, you’re now presented with a modern layout with separate buttons for jumping, boosting, sprinting and goal shooting. There are even modifier buttons to let you cancel out of a goal shooting attempt, making for the prospect of faking out your foes by mimicking one action while preparing another. There’s clearly been some thought to a deeper level of strategy here, which is no bad thing in itself.
Likewise, the fact that alongside the classic Speedball Arena, you’ve now got optional pitches that incorporate hazards such as ice cannons, floating mines and flamethrowers, plus some cute tweaks like the inclusion of a team of 2001 Judge Dredd characters – because Rebellion owns the 2001 IP entirely – should make Speedball the superior sequel I’ve been waiting decades for.
The problem is that 2026’s take on Speedball feels like a game that still needs at least six months more development and polish before it’s time to get out on the pitch and rumble.
The presentation is quite bare-bones; in single player mode you’ve got the option to either engage in a quick match or enter a league, but where Speedball 2 tasked you with taking the Brutal Deluxe team and not only winning matches with them but also upgrading players along the way, this is replaced with a simpler drafting mechanism that lets you add players on the way, with stats resetting after each league season is completed. Want to individually upgrade players, trade players or build up a superior squad over multiple seasons of play? Sorry, that’s not a feature of the game as it stands.
Winning a season with a team does unlock some new goodies and the idea is that you’ll want to do so with every single provided team, but it’s not exactly a dynasty mode that gives you connection with your players in any real way. Online play is also supported but I had little joy in trying to get an online game up and running – if I was guessing, I’d say a lot of the potential Speedball player base is likely playing something like Rocket League instead, and I can’t entirely blame them.
While Speedball offers a variety of difficulty levels, it’s not worth playing against the computer at anything below medium level or higher, because it’s just downright stupid at that level. If there’s a difference between the Easy and Normal modes, I’m not seeing it, and both may as well be called “moronically easy” to save time.
I coasted through one season of games never once scoring less than 100+ points per game while my opponents scored 10 or less, and typically only then if they got a lucky injury on one of my players (worth 10 points in itself) in the second half on normal difficulty without even bothering to go through the game’s tutorial “boot camp” mode. Once I’d completed boot camp, that margin went up to 150+ points per game, not helped by the fact that I worked out a number of ways to approach the goal that never failed to score at that difficulty level.
The lack of polish in visual terms is seen through some janky animations and the rather simple omission of any kind of replay mode for your scored goals. Instead you get a player celebration, and while these are fun the first time, they quickly get boring. Speedball also rather oddly doesn’t allow you to remap the controls if you wanted that, and in 2026, it feels downright weird to even suggest that a game wouldn’t support control remapping.
Speedball is more fun in two player mode, especially if you’re in the position for a little couch-based play because that does remove the limits of the game’s slightly dodgy AI.
Here, however the very control complexity that makes this more than just a simple Speedball 2 retread is an issue; unless both players have sorted out how the controls work then play is always unbalanced and as a result not a lot of fun for both players.
Games these days are rarely “finished”, but I’m not 100% certain that a smaller niche title like Speedball will see much in the way of post-release content and patching. If it does, it could evolve into a nice little game for those who fondly remember the original – but as always, I can only review what’s in front of me, and at launch, there’s just not enough of Speedball to make it a particularly compelling prospect at full game price.
