Bang Average Football review for PC

As someone who grew up playing sports games where you had a set roster for each team and couldn’t do much else with it, it’s crazy to see games that look like they could’ve come out 30+ years ago but that have all the depth you’d expect from modern games. That was the case with Retro Goal a few years ago, we saw it last year with Legend Bowl (even if it wasn’t all that good, at least on the Switch) and now we’re seeing it again with Bang Average Football.

In fact, if I’m being honest, I probably enjoy Bang Average Football a lot more than I enjoy a lot of more modern-looking sports games – and it’s not just out of some misplaced sense of nostalgia, either, but because it’s a genuinely fun game.

To a large extent, the fun comes from the fact it doesn’t skimp on its single-player mode. Yes, it has local multiplayer if you want to really capture the feeling of playing a sports game on an ancient console, but the real draw of Bang Average Football is that it has a story mode you can sink a tonne of time into – and, more importantly, that you’ll want to sink a tonne of time into.

The story revolves around your player arriving in town to start playing on a third-rate soccer team in rural England. From there, it’s on you to build the team up to a powerhouse, and along the way you don’t just get to play a bunch of matches, you also get to renovate the stadium, add new players, and redesign your uniforms however you see fit. To add to the cozy, English countryside vibe of it all, you also get to meet the locals, talking to them to find out how your team’s reputation is growing and seeing what other weird shenanigans they’re getting into. Once you’re bored of them, you also get to visit other nearby towns. It’s a pleasant, self-contained little world that also gives you plenty of stuff to do between games.

Of course, it also helps that Bang Average Football is pretty fun on the pitch, too. While the controls are basic and the action is similar to what you would’ve seen back on a SNES, the game moves so quickly and so fluidly that it’s easy to find yourself playing game after game after game.

And really, Bang Average Football is a game that deserves having people play game after game after game. Not only does it perfectly nail the feeling of playing sports games back in their infancy, it also adds a cozy, Stardew Valley-style frame around the whole thing that you’ll want to do even if you don’t usually like those kinds of sims. It’s an excellent game all-around that does a whole lot of things right.

Banana Life provided us with a Bang Average Football PC code for review purposes.