Talk about kicking it old-school. The signing of one-man brand Dino Dini should have been a real coup for Sony. Coming over 25 years after Kick Off 2 - still a totemic 16-bit scrambler, as beloved in its own weird way as the all-conquering Sensible Soccer - the announcement of Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival had the makings of an irresistible comeback. Here was the return of a coding legend with a thumping reboot of his signature game, promising a stripped-back antidote to the iterated bloat of the FIFA/PES monetary industrial complex. Kick Off Revival would also be a six-month exclusive on PS4 with a Vita version apparently warming up on the touchline. For the players, indeed.
Somewhere along the way, that FA Cup underdog narrative has veered wildly off course. It must have seemed a smart move to get the game into the hands of fans during the airhorn hoopla of a major football tournament - Kick Off Revival's cup mode defaults to the official UEFA Euro 2016 groups, albeit with teams of fictionalised players. But it also makes the final product's simplistic presentation and sparse feature set seem like the inevitable result of a rushed release. So far, the critical reception has been hostile. Most of the reviews make at least one fair point: even for a budget-priced game, Kick Off Revival is so bare-bones, it resembles the singing skeleton from the old Scotch VHS ads. (And at least that dude had the ability to record highlights - Kick Off Revival doesn't even have an instant replay feature.)
If the main selling point of Kick Off Revival is the spartan purity of the gameplay, you could argue that piling on screeds of cosmetic options would be a distraction. But even Kick Off 2 ultras might agree that things like yellow cards, red cards and substitutions aren't silly extraneous distractions that need to be ruthlessly sliced away to get at the beating heart of football. Extra time and penalties to definitively decide a draw don't really seem like outrageous impositions either. And if the tacit implication is that Kick Off Revival will require many hours of play to intuit all of its subtleties, being able to extend the duration of a match - or even just offering more than one pitch to break up the monotony - might have been nice too.
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