I am a sucker for a well-crafted Tecmo Bowl-inspired pixel gridiron game.
I’m embarrassed to tell people how many hours I’ve sunken into various seasons in New Star Game’s Retro Bowl.
So, I’m excited to see a brand-new launch trailer for Top Hat Studios‘ Legend Bowl.
I am worried that I may lose myself to this game because Top Hat promises that there’s “1000s of hours worth of gameplay, stuffed to the brim with features that made you truly feel like the coach, and with endless replayability. With the perfect mix of hybrid arcade-style football and simulation aspects on and off the field.”
And with Madden making it harder and harder to enjoy anything that isn’t online play, that is something I am sorely missing.
Unlike the football franchise named above, Legend Bowl will focus on its fully-fledged “Franchise” mode. Create you’re own coach or pick one of the 32 teams’ coaches. Take on a 17-week season, where you manage your facilities, players’ needs, and the media. Prime yourself for success by participating in a full seven-round draft process, dynamic free agency, player progression system and ultimately, retirement cycle.
Like any good sports simulator, you’ll be able to fully customize players, coaches, and teams. If you are one of those who likes to control every aspect of the simulation [I am not], you can even create your own custom dream league.
Football — Canadian and American — is a game of weather, so I’m excited to see a realistic weather system that adds more than just rain, snow, and sun seen often in Tecmo Bowl clones. While that weather system is present in Legend Bowl, it is complemented by a full lighting and shadow system that makes a pixel field look broadcast-realistic regarding cloud cover, shadows of stadium roofs and scoreboards and footprints in wet, sunken turf.
Legend Bowl also throws in a full gameday atmosphere to UI with field stat overlays, halftime stats, end-of-game stats, field art, live referees, chain gang, mascots, advertisements, fans, and more get you immersed in the game and put you in the stadium!
Legend Bowl will be brought to PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Series X|S consoles by Top Hat Studios, Inc. this summer 2023.
