XF: Football Arena Review - Interesting gameplay with little content

XF: Football Arena is the latest installment of a 3v3 soccer game from developers 9M Interactive. They have developed Extreme Football, another street-like football game that has amassed more than 5 million downloads since its launch.

The new XF Football Arena was inspired by Extreme Football, considering how the game draws heavy inspiration from it. XF Football offers new and stylishly improved graphics that give it a Cyberpunk feel when playing a match.

Despite being in early access, the game still has a lot to improve upon, and in this review, we’ll be looking at the games’ positive and negative aspects while also slightly comparing it to Extreme Football. So without wasting any more time, let’s get into it!

THE GOOD

Impressive Graphics and Visuals

XF: Football Arena comes with improved graphics that make it stand out compared to similar games in the genre. The character designs are impressive; there are many customizations to be used, such as changing your outfit, changing the balls, using Booster drinks to boost your player’s performance, and others.

When compared to Extreme Football in this aspect, both games’ graphics are pretty much identical. If the developers decide to improve the graphics of XF Football beyond the point at which it stands currently, then it will surely surpass that of Extreme Football.

Good In-Game Camera Angles

In a match, players can change the camera angles and set it to their preferred one. This is pretty cool because it is a feature that is usually added to street soccer games on console and PC. And now you can use it on mobile as well. Changing your camera allows you to enjoy the game from different perspectives. If you’re not getting a better view of the pitch in a particular camera view, you can simply switch to another. The game allows you to switch to up to 5 different camera views.

Nice Player Skills

XF: Football Arena shows off some pretty incredible special skills from the characters, also known as heroes, that we cannot wait to use when the game is fully launched. The skills are fictional, and each character possesses their unique skill and perk that makes them stand out. But each character also has varying weak points.

The first skill we used was the Dash skill which allows your character to speed past an opponent without them even noticing your movement. There’s also a similar Sliding Tackle skill that lets you perform an instant sliding tackle on an opponent to either win the ball or stop them from scoring. 

There are lots of skills that can be used and unlocked in this, most of which may not be available to use in the games’ early access stage. But ultimately, it is one aspect of the game that we’d love to see improved.

Fast-Paced Gameplay

The fast-paced gameplay is pretty cool because it follows the street soccer rules: matches aren’t longer than 15 minutes. However, in this game, you can finish a match in as little as 3 minutes, depending on how fast you score a goal. Another cool part about the fast-paced action is that the first player to score wins the game.

Perhaps with the release of the full game, this concept might change, or new modes will be added that allows players to play longer by allowing you to score more than one goal against your opponent.

THE BAD

Terrible Controls and Tutorials

XF: Football Arena offers really bad game controls that just need more work. The movement button is pretty stable, but the A and B buttons feel misplaced that often it feels like they don’t even serve any actual purpose. One of the reasons for this is the games’ brief and awful tutorial at the start. 

The tutorial does little to give players the proper how-to on playing the game. There are three buttons overall, and each of these buttons does a lot more than tapping them once, which is what you will learn from the tutorials before getting the prompt that the tutorial is finished.

The tutorial only teaches you how to pass, shoot and use a special skill. There’s no tutorial on how to tackle opponents, how to call for the ball (since you won’t be controlling all three players but one), or how to perform a steal. These are important aspects that should’ve been included, but for some reason, they weren’t.

The developers probably assumed players could learn these independently from the training, but that’s worse because even the training instructions that include all the games’ available controls and skill buttons don’t do enough to make it very understandable for players. Hopefully, this will be fixed before the full launch.

Network Errors     

The game often pulls up a network error prompt, which is weird when you’re playing on a stable and uninterrupted wifi network. So that’s another area that we hope the developers will take a look at and hopefully fix before the games’ full launch.

CONCLUSION

Since this game is still in early access, some of its features are under development, and we can’t necessarily outline them in our review, such as the shop, the pre-season, leaderboards, etc. Often you can’t even access the leaderboard due to the games’ network connectivity issues. 

Anyhow XF: Football Arena is a promising game that hopes to reimagine the street football genre on the mobile platform by introducing mixed gender and diverse characters, incredible graphics and visuals, excellent sets of special skills, and fast-paced gameplay.

The games’ lack of a proper and detailed tutorial and its connectivity issues negatively impact it. The game will need serious fixes to get it to the same gameplay level as Extreme Football or, even better, to surpass it altogether. XF: Football Arena isn’t without its charms, but right now, those charms are covered by unstable and unenjoyable game controls that offer no proper way to control your character.