#13 Legend Bowl (PC - 2021) 4/5 (Playtime 115 hours)
Since the beginning of the idea of representing sport within the realm of video gaming or otherwise, I have been interested in that convergence. When I was younger, I played Avalon Hill's (Statis Pro) Baseball and Pro Tennis. I've played Strat-o-Matic baseball, both the board and computer versions. I had many different handheld sports games from Mattel and others - you know, the ones with the little red LEDs representing the action. I even had the old electric football board game where you plug it in and the little guys vibrate around the metal gridiron in often hilarious and inaccurate ways; I still don't think those little adjusters on the bases did too much of anything, lol. (It was from the Vikings/Raiders Super Bowl XI season in 1977, and those were the two teams that came with my version. Sad face to the real game's outcome.) And in the video game realm, I was sports gaming from the outset, enjoying the original Atari Football and Real Sports Football, among many others, and across all sports. I have played ***countless*** physical and digital representations of so many different sports, all with their own distinct approach and flavor, and it's an interest that hasn't faded over time for me. So in that quest to scratch that persistent itch, I bought a 2021 independent football game on the PC called Legend Bowl, programmed by a previous member of some iteration of the Madden team, I believe.
From a presentation standpoint, it is reminiscent of the earlier 16-bit Maddens, viewed from above, although more directly above than those early games. And the players are all sprite-based, compact little guys that are quite amusing to watch run around the field. There's not a lot of detail visually, like you might expect even with the PS2-era NFL games, but the visuals are sharp, colorful, and uncluttered. As far as visual presentation, it's very basic and old-school. But there are pluses that come along with such simplicity. Being unbound to complex animation routines, the feel of input to action is very snappy and responsive, being untethered to realistic movements and the loss of immediate control that comes with such lengthy and control-removing cycles. The players' movement is crisp and tight, and you always feel rooted to whoever you're controlling in a satisfying way. You'll see no helmet logos on the players as they move or many other details common to more hardware intensive games, but there are plenty of nice touches to bring the game to life. Players chatter at each other endlessly in such amusing ways. There's always jawing going on, and when players get hurt, they'll call out in sympathetic pain to their fallen brother, “He hurt. He hurt!” I particularly loved how they mocked Peyton Manning's “Omaha” call. They gave it such a pathetic and wimpy vocal timbre, which for me was quite amusing. Maybe it wasn't intended as mockery (probably not) as they have other silly voice work aplenty, but I'll believe that it is, and it most certainly makes me smile. (God, I hate that soulless, shallow shill.) The ref will also fall down if he's bumped into, which is always funny to see. But to be succinct, there's plenty of playfulness in the way of little expressions that impart a charming style and personality. There is no NFL license, as should be expected in a post-Madden-exclusivity world, and even if that weren't the case, it would be unfair to expect a small developer to shell out the requisite fee. But there is modding as a part of the package, and I installed a full NFL mod right from the jump, and it had all the players you'd expect to see as well as a reworking of all the fields with team-appropriate logos in the end-zones. But even if you can't or don't want to mod things, you can adjust team names, player names (and ratings), along with a uniform-editor as well. So you can really go wild with the creation of your own little fictional football world if you are so inclined. As far as sound goes, there's a wonderful chiptune soundtrack that really evokes the old days. It's peppy with the right synth-style frequencies and seems like it could have been pulled directly from the era. On the field, aside from player chatter, there's also a nice representation of the physical struggle with player noises befitting the battle. There's even some entertaining soundwork for special moves when players say “trampoline!” when executing the hurdle maneuver or “BOOM” when executing the power move that comes accompanied with a satisfying screen shake if timed properly, leaving the would-be tackler satisfyingly thrown out of your way. The only real negative for me from a presentation standpoint was the fact that the camera doesn't swing around on punts, so rather than running away from your vantage point as viewed behind the screen (or upwards, I guess, to be more accurate) you are running towards it, which was awkward since in all other instances you'll be moving in a relative forwards/upwards direction. Granted, on defense you are going the other direction, but I'm referring to movement in cases where you have the ball. It was just a bit unintuitive, and I never felt otherwise, even after many hours of play. But overall, Legend Bowl makes a good showing of itself from an audiovisual standpoint.
As far as actual gameplay and structure are concerned, Legend Bowl also has a great deal to offer. In the first place, despite the cute presentation, this is much more of a sim in regard to most things. There's a satisfying amount of plays to select from on both sides of the ball, and more than in most football games, good playcalling really seems to be rewarded. Run a 46 defense against an empty set, and well, you should expect to get torched. Have your defense in a soft nickel or dime zone expecting the pass, and expect to get gashed by the run with mismatched personnel as your players have to try and adjust. Granted, other NFL games require understanding the fundamentals of the sport as well, but it just felt translated particularly well here, and simply calling plays in that chess match was really fun. Along those lines, you can also “play” all your games in coach mode, although I never did so and don't know if that would have translated as well with complete removal of control once the ball has been snapped. Also worth noting is that the PC will OFTEN audible out of their play in response to what you show them. And when you hear the QB call out a change, you'd often be wise to switch your coverage. The downside of this is that you cannot pre-select audibles on either side of the ball. You're limited to a selection of 4 calls - assigned to the d-pad - that are apparently randomly selected from the chosen formation prior to executing your audible. I would have much preferred to have had the option to craft my own specialized calls, even if only given four total, so that I could have familiarity with my options. Because usually after the opposing QB calls an audible, he'll snap the ball almost immediately, giving you little chance to view your potential adjustments, making you feel rather helpless in response. This aspect could be frustrating at times, but it was never so impactful that I felt like it decided the outcome of games. You also cannot use hot routes (on either side of the ball) for individual players, and having played so much NFL action over the years, I really missed the ability to make a granular change in response to what I thought my opponent was going to do based on the look they were giving me. Of course (at least on defense), you can take control of whomever you wish and force a shift in how things play out from a single player's perspective, and I often did so, bringing a safety or linebacker up to the line to pressure the QB when I felt my coverage could withstand the loss of that player in exchange for quick heat on the QB. In terms of plays and their execution, this game could have really benefited from a play editor. I always love crafting my own plays, and I can't remember that feature being present in any football game I've played since one Madden entry on the PS1. I always assumed that it's because it is too easy to exploit the CPU and break the game when allowed to structure your own plays, as was certainly the case with that old version of Madden, but I always really WANT to be my own mad scientist of an offensive and defensive coordinator. Unfortunately, even though the playbooks were pretty expansive, this was a missing feature that I keep hoping to see whenever I fire up a football game.
In terms of the players themselves, ratings really matter. Throw it up for grabs to Justin Jefferson, and often good things happen. Run it with Derrick Henry and knock down dem pins. There was a palpable value in relying upon your better players, and the better their ratings, the more likely it would be that they would win their individual matchups. It was generally very helpful and prudent to peruse your opponent's roster sheet and player ratings and probe for weaknesses on each side of the ball prior to the coin toss so that you knew exactly what you were dealing with as you looked for those advantages. Play calling and game planning are HUGE here. Understanding situations, both in terms of down and distance as well as opposing personnel, really allows the player to exploit advantages in their favor in Legend Bowl. Opponent weak on their right D-line? Well, you WILL notice a difference in running to your left side - assuming your blocking isn't very poor. (Speaking of blocking, Legend Bowl probably had the most satisfying representation of this fundamental element of football that I have experienced. Guys held their blocks if they were good blockers or got tossed aside if not.) Got a stud WR. Heave and hope (against single coverage in particular), and you'll see things turn out positively more often than if you're tossing it up to an average wideout. etc. The bottom line is that game-planning properly is wonderfully reflected between the lines, and thoroughly understanding the roster of both your team and your opponent, along with calling your plays in accordance with your strengths against their weaknesses (and masking your weaknesses as best as possible) will net realistic and satisfying results. It's pure sim in this regard. In that same vein, you can really build your team the way you want if you have a particular football philosophy, even with the limited roster management. (more on that later) Do you want to play a 3-4 with a focus on speedy linebackers? Well, draft that trait with your picks and upgrade your facilities to favor their position's desired qualities. (more on this later as well) Want a bullying run-game where you just ram it down your opposition's throat? Again, focus on those aspects in the draft and in your facility upgrades. Get your beef eaters up front and a stallion to feed the rock and make your opponent wilt. And because of the fact that player differences and their impact can really be felt in the course of actual gameplay, it's really satisfying to tailor your team to your preferred philosophy and play-style. Really fun. In short, the feel of football was nicely conveyed with players that felt unique and game-planning that impactfully reflected the strengths and weaknesses of rosters. Overall, players really feel ***DISTINCT*** which is huge and makes for a more organic feeling of pigskin. And coupled with the tight controls, it's ever-satisfying to throw out a stiff arm to a pursuing tackler, toss him to the side, and jet down the sideline for the score, by way of example. Good stuff. On the flip side of that, I did feel that the value of speed was a bit overemphasized. I drafted a speedy back one year, and even on the highest difficulty, I could often run sweeps to the far side of the hash at the snap and consistently get decent yardage. To be fair, you'd get blown up in the backfield sometimes, but it was too reliable and made speed too empowering. Similarly with linebackers, even if their overall rating wasn't up to snuff, if they were fast, they'd be flying all over the field making plays for you. It was fun, but a little game-breaking and unbalanced in that regard.
As far as the game modes, you can play exhibition, tournament, or franchise. There is multiplayer, but only local couch play. Of course, the meat of the sports game will always be franchise mode in terms of the single-player experience, and it was quite a unique version of that idea in Legend Bowl. It's a very streamlined and minimally micro-management-oriented experience. There is no full roster management like you might expect in Madden. Your team has a chemistry rating - basically if you're winning, most of your players, and therefore your team, will be happy. The less happy your team, the more roster “events” you'll have to deal with. Sometimes you'll be faced with three players, for example, and you'll have to choose one to drop. (This player will be replaced in a “trade” with a lesser player from some other team as a sort of penalty.) Or you may have contract demands that you can meet or reject, allowing the player to walk and again be placed with a lower-level player. In my experience, the finances never played much of a role, however. You are shown where your team roster spending ranks, and I think it influences events if you are higher in the league in terms of expenditures, but it never had any discernible impact that I could observe in the grand scheme of things. Granted, I stayed in the lower half of the league throughout my franchise time, so maybe if I'd gotten a really expensive roster, I would have noticed some effects. You will also occasionally be offered trades - something you cannot initiate on your own. In these situations you are offered a one-for-one deal for another player of the same position. You can accept or reject or cycle through other players of the same position on your team to generate an alternative trade (which was always accepted in my experience). Of course there are elements to consider, like how much the contract is, how old the player, the difference in ratings, and their soft traits like work ethic, loyalty, etc. But there is no aspect of micro-managing your roster. You can adjust depth charts, but you cannot offer trades, cut or resign players or free agents outside the limited scenarios that are presented to you. There is, however, a year-end draft, which I enjoyed. But it is a similarly pared-back affair where picks are in the inverse order of finish with no trades or other action to spice up the event. So overall, your experience with franchise will be a kind of middle ground between the simplicity of a game like Tecmo Super Bowl and the in-depth aspects of more in-depth sims like Madden and 2K. I felt like Legend Bowl wanted to walk a middle ground between being overly simple and offering some depth, with the primary focus on getting the player out on the field to play more games. It was a pretty nice balance, even if the tinkerer in me wanted to dig into things more than I was allowed. In addition to the roster management aspects, you will be earning money each week, and those funds will be used to build various stadium facilities that affect various modifiers like player ratings in specific areas, weekly income earned, player happiness, and the like. So if you've got a collection of good blocking linemen, for example, you can also focus on facility upgrades that strengthen those traits even further and turn them into real mauling monsters.
So mostly, I was really satisfied and enjoying Legend Bowl. But it did have some weaknesses to its game, and I'm afraid I have to toss at least a 5-yard flag. Firstly, like all the rest of the on-field action, playing defense was fun and controlled well, but generating user interceptions was a mystery I'll never solve. Of course I did get some interceptions, but it had nothing to do with my positioning (even when it was perfect). It just felt random and beyond your control. It was more about having the right play called and/or getting pressure, or just dumb luck, really. Also, on the defensive side of the ball, lining up your tackles could be really tough sometimes. It was most problematic when lining up close to a receiver who had just caught the ball. It was very easy to be off in your angle for your hit, and you'd end up whiffing, setting the player loose. This was because your defender would be shifting around on his own as the ball approached. The only solution was to take control of that defender BEFORE the ball arrived, but it was still a little tricky and awkward oftentimes. Movement is snappy, and it's very easy to take a poor angle and give up a big gain. On the flip side, making a big hit and getting a huge stop is REALLY satisfying, especially if you are blitzing and blow up the RB or QB with user control to really put them behind the sticks. Some little details could also be off at times. I clearly ran out of bounds one time, yet it wasn't called, and I ended up scoring. I think the issue was that I had executed a special move at the exact same moment (a stiff arm), and the game read that move as being in-bounds since it probably was at the time, and failed to account for the change in my player's position after the fact. On kickoffs there were a couple of instances of a player popping into the play from nowhere. I'm sure he was always “there” within the game code, although not visible for some reason. Stuff like this was rare and didn't affect my overall enjoyment, and the issues of incorrect “processing” were fewer than you get in animation-heavy 3D game engines overall, to be fair to Legend Bowl. One of my biggest gripes is the aforementioned fact that there is no online multiplayer. This game is just BEGGING for that head-to-head competition, and I was craving going online and testing myself against the better players out there. Which brings me to my biggest complaint. The game was just too easy overall. Selecting a difficulty in single-player sports games is not something I take lightly. Ideally, of course, (properly balanced) human multiplayer brings out the real fun and excitement when evenly matched players adjust and adjust to those adjustments - that stuff is THRILLING - straight FIRE! But in the absence of a human opponent, there is still plenty of fun to be had against a reasonable AI. What I've found works best, if I'm intending to play many seasons, is to start out on the default difficulty (no need to play the lower levels) and keep it fixed on that until I've won a championship. After I've done that, I bump up to the next level and repeat. If I reach a point that the top difficulty is no longer an obstacle to dominance, I know I've squeezed all the juice I can get out of a title. And that's what I did here. I started on “PRO” (the default difficulty - there are difficulties below this) and bumped it up as I went. I went 14-2 (won Super Bowl) on PRO difficulty, 15-1 (won Super Bowl) on Veteran difficulty, and 15-1 (won Super Bowl) on Superstar difficulty. It wasn't until the maximum difficulty (Legend) that I started to encounter any real resistance, and it was mostly in the form of a super-powered AI opponent. Granted, I kept winning almost every game and could move the ball and play defense, but running the ball became much more of a chore. (until I got a really speedy back - by ratings and facility upgrades).........But once I won my fourth Super Bowl in my fifth season and did so going a total 19-0 with the number one offense and number one defense AND on the highest difficulty of ‘Legend’, beating the Ravens in the title game 63-21 (sorry cane), I felt the challenge and life of the game were gone. I ended up with a +317 point differential in that fifth and final season, with the Ravens finishing second at a +112. That's right, my average margin of victory over the 16-game schedule was 20 points (rounded)...on the toughest challenge the game had to offer. I had a lot of fun, but lacking online multiplayer and having no one close who's into sports gaming (or gaming in general), I found myself having exhausted this title. Granted, I got many hours of fun from it, but I would have LOVED to see some online action of any kind - especially franchise.
Like with many sports games, once you get the basic concepts and execution down and learn the particular game's “rules”, the only challenge can come from an unfair AI opponent. I appreciate that Legend Bowl didn't cheat like, um, some other games not to be mentioned, but I also was rarely challenged. After playing 115 hours and 5+ seasons and playoffs, I had a combined record of 87-8, four Super Bowl wins in 5 seasons and had started 2-0 in season six, realizing that having no challenge just exhausted my desire. The reason winning is a worthwhile and satisfying goal in sports is because the opposition gives meaning to your victories - it's tough to win and climb that mountain. When you're a major league club against a bunch of high-schoolers, tossing perfect games like handing out candy, if you'll forgive the mixed sports metaphor, there just isn't any real value in the accomplishment. It loses its flavor and meaning. And so it was here for me in the end. Granted, Tecmo Super Bowl is similarly void of challenge, and I love that as well. But this also had an aspect of feeling too mechanical and overly uniform, without some of the idiosyncrasies and odd quirks that give a game a real fascinating personality. Like the aforementioned Tecmo Super Bowl, you've got the hilariously unbalanced presence of Bo Jackson that is so completely game-breaking that the Raiders are banned from all serious tournament play. Legend Bowl didn't have any of those uneven edges to give it a really distinct and memorable flavor, even though it did play a very good game of X's and O's. It felt...predictable, and without that...dynamic variability, things sort of devolved into a bit of a mundane experience, as it was really easy to identify coverages and just pick teams apart on both sides of the ball. The bones are FANTASTIC, and if there was an online component where you could match sticks and wits against other good players, I would have likely, almost assuredly, given this a 5/5. But as it is, it's a strong football/sporting experience that was just a little shy of greatness for me. Certainly recommended for any football fan, and of course, ymmv with difficulty. I'm certainly not great at all games, and I struggle with many titles that others find easy, but I just wasn't challenged enough with Legend Bowl to make the overall experience feel like it had the legs that the fundamentals deserved, and I did read a good number of takes that complained that it was too challenging on the higher difficulties. I wanted to play the advertised “infinite number of seasons” and to watch my roster evolve and change over time as well as knocking down some hallowed NFL records while doing so - records that are there for your perusal and obliteration if you are able. But it would have simply been rote button mashing without any highs and lows once I had "conquered" the game, in the end. 4/5 and surely worth it, and even more so if you have a local bud to enjoy the game with.
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