This roguelike has you batter mutants with ricocheting footballs

I’ve never been a true “Football Enjoyer”. I’ll weirdly get into it at certain times, like when the World Cup is on and I get suckered into the belief that, “It’s actually coming home this time”. But maybe I could be a football enjoyer, now that there’s a roguelike out there that combines football skills with room-clearing. I’d give Footgun Underground’s demo at least 90 minutes of your time.

The premise of Footgun Underground is simple: You’re a guy who has to clear rooms of increasingly difficult baddies, and to do so, you will be kicking a football. What’s neat is how you’ll alternate between punting the ball as it ricochets off walls, to controlling it with a right click, finding an appropriate angle, then firing it like a cannon. Except the cannon is your foot.

Yes, it might seem a bit gimmicky! It has lots of different balls to discover, a branching path of rooms that lead to an eventual boss, and the usual roguelike gubbins. But in my brief time with the demo, I thought it put an interesting spin on how I approached levels. Normally I’d race around, slashing and bashing, with my attention mostly concentrated on where I’m at.

Yet here it’s a lot more about positioning yourself in optimal places to intercept a rebound, or switching your focus from the pinball to how the enemies are lined up. Can you hop in the gap, line up a shot, then blast them down like skittles? Yes, probably.

Footgun Underground is due to release in April, and you can keepy uppy with the game over on its Steam page.