Street Power Football is about to step inside your front room when it arrives this summer and Gamesapce got an early look at this very different style of soccer before it kicks off on Pc, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One.
Street Power Football isn’t exactly the regular sports sims that we’ve come to expect with a footballing title. Brought to life by the teams at SFL Interactive, Gamajun Games, and Maximum games, Street Power Football presents itself as a breath of fresh air from the monotony of the beautiful game and looks set to subvert the genre stereotypes that we’ve seen from far too many soccer sims. That’s no surprise, however, because Street Power Football takes inspiration from a different type of ball game. Instead of heading to la Ligue for superstar players, Street Power Football is more likely to be seen in the car park focusing on the street style game.
Street Style
Street Style or Freestyle soccer might not seem like the most obvious sport to take to PCs and consoles but it’s clear from the offset that Street Power Football is not trying to tackle FIFA in the gaming charts. Instead, the bright colors celebrity faces and an upbeat soundtrack from the likes of The Black-Eyed Peas, DJ Snake, Snap, and Daniel Got Hits make for an attractive and easily engaged title that doesn’t require an instant knowledge of the offside rule, or a delicate understanding of how to form up for a free kick. Instead, this freestyle football is a sport where one player and the ball go one on one to perform some of the most epic stunts that you could imagine. My initial impression of Street power Football was that this could be the NBA Jam of football games, and I wasn’t entirely wrong.
The Modes
If it wasn’t already clear that you’re not going to be taking penalties in Street Power Football then taking one quick glimpse at the play models cements this impression. Across a range of brightly lit worldwide locations, Street Power Football servers up six distinct game modes for players to engage in.
Become King
The Become Street King Story mode presents players with their very own zero to hero single player mode and acts as a great introduction to the game’s very varied control systems. Acting as protégé to street legend Sean Garnier, players get the chance to take on a variety of challenges and get a glimpse into many of the systems, allowing you to learn tricks and practice your own skills before getting into many of the stand alone modes available throughout the rest of the game. If you want to learn how to freestyle before going in for real then this looks like it will prove incredibly useful for anybody new to Street Power Football.
Panna Cage Battles
Not quite as brutal as it sounds, panna cage battles are one of the embodiments that many players might find more familiar if they come straight from FIFA. A high paced one vs one battle in an enclosed environment this stage plunges players the worlds best freestyle players into a competition to score more points than the other person. While goals are worth a shot at either end of this intimate pitch, players can score even more potential points by passing the ball between the legs of their opponent’s legs. This panna, or nutmeg for those of you in the UK, is the ultimate humiliation in the world of soccer but don’t expect to shoot the way you’re used to.
While you’ll feel plenty at home moving one of freestyles greats around a panna cage, Street Fighter fans will feel right at home in panna mode too. In order to outclass your opponents and successfully pass the ball between an opponent’s legs, competitors are pushed to repeat a series of beat em up style timed moves. Get them right and you might even come out on top for this encounter, slipping the ball past your opponent and grabbing an extra point for slotting home a goal too. Panna mode takes the skill required for a traditional soccer match and warps it into an interesting duel that blends in competitive fighting elements.
Freestyle
When we sat down with the team behind Street Power Football, Freestyle mode turned out to be one of the best examples of how Street power Football might very well stand apart from other sports games. In real life, freestyle sports stars take a ball on stage and perform incredible tricks for fans. In Street power football, SFL Interactive and Gamajun have largely pivoted well away from what you’d expect and built something more akin to a rhythm game than a kick around. As a superstar freestyler sands atop a stage, symbols float across the screen and players must punch in the correct commands as they activate. It’s a largely straightforward concept that builds in complexity, pushing player’s reaction times and building up to epic streaks and high scores. What’s obvious is that this isn’t just easy to pick up and play, but it allows gamers to still engage with what’s going on in front of them. The same way that much of the Rock Band experience is about the soundtrack, half the fun of freestyle looks set to be watching your very own avatar flipping across the screen and breaking all the laws of gravity with a ball.
Looking Good
That is just a few of the game modes we had the opportunity to take a deep dive into. Street Power football also includes a range of other challenges, including 3v3 kick abouts and trick shots that showcase the talent of each freestyle atar and let gamers show off their own achievements. While Street Power Football largely focuses on the faces of freestyle, gamers can still customize their characters. It’s a bit disappointing not to see completely customizable character creation but also understandable. The team behind this are definitely looking to reach as wide an audience as possible, incorporating a slick mash-up of game modes and innovative concepts while allowing the featured stars to make waves for the game. Street Power Football features some big hitters in the freestyle world, including Sean Garnier and Liv Cooke, who many of our euro readers will recognise from the BBC’s Match of The Day. With a such a huge mix of styles and plenty of eyes on the stars of the title, there should be plenty of people available for the game’s multiplayer modes, allowing you to progress to more difficult daily challenges and earn skins, and stylised clothing for a huge variety of athletes. It’s not just about the personalities behind the ball either, the bright, almost cartoon-like, aesthetic is clearly designed to make Street power Football feel less like a simulation and more like a fun approachable experience. The designers behind the game noted that the presentation of titles like Fortnite and Overwatch has had a big influence in opening up the market to a more casual audience. It’s clear that following that tempo for Street power Football is deliberate.
Our Thoughts
After watching some of the games’ pros., or their digital avatars, swivel, bounce, and flip across this battlefield it’s clear that Street power Football is more than just another kickabout. It’s a lively range of engaging encounters that seeks to embody a different flavour of football and has somehow managed to embrace that ideology when producing a game based on this new sport. When chatting with SFL Interactive and Gamajun, they escribed how a goal that set out to make something that harks back to Mario Strikers or NBA jam turned into a game that looks to incorporate the essence of freestyle and the urban kick about too. There was never an initial intent to make game modes like Panna, but the passion of the pros that were consulted and captured for Street Power saw the title creep into other areas. The result is a game that looks like it could be the soccer experience for everybody who is tired of a game of two halves and instead wants to take those jumpers for goalposts and perform an epic looking trick shot between them.
Get ready to try out your own trick shots by checking out the official Street power Football website and having a kick about on PC, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One this summer.
