Hooligans: The Bravest proved to be a very difficult game for me to review, if I’m completely honest. It’s not that it’s a bad game; not really. Nor is it that it’s an especially brilliant game either.

The game itself, really, is more or less what you’d expect from a title so obviously capitalising on the current World Cup popularity; a fairly solid, if uninspiring, gameplay experience with the football theme somewhat shoe-horned in.

The basic concept is that in an alternate reality football has been banned by an evil, totalitarian regime, leaving underground guerrilla fighters to resist in the only way they can; by forming football ‘firms’ and smashing the place up. Obviously, right?
The gameplay takes the form of a side-scrolling beat-em up; think Streets of Rage or Golden Axe and you’ve got the gist of things; general principal-wise anyway. You control a specific hooligan (or Hero as the game terms them) and guide them across the level, beating up masked police and officials along the way, until you encounter their riot van, which you destroy to win the level. To assist you, the game allows you to trade in collected pints of beer for extra hooligan NPCs, which fight at your side. There are also a number of special items available and each hero has a set of special attacks which do additional damage or cause status effects, all of which recharge over time; pretty standard stuff, all things considered.

The problem with the previous Streets of Rage & Golden Axe analogy is that it implies direct action input, with the player being in direct control of all their character’s actions, which is only partly true in this case. While you do determine where your hero goes and whom he attacks, the concessions to the touch-screen interface mean that you do so by single screen taps, as opposed to a traditional controller imput . You click on a spot and your hero ambles there in his own sweet time; you click on an enemy and he’ll proceed to stand there and wail on it relentlessly until it falls over. Rinse and repeat until you win.
The major issues, gameplay-wise, are the slow pace and the fact that you feel pretty uninvolved in the whole process (the latter issue being what I term Final Fantasy XIII syndrome). On the other hand, the visual design and layout is superb, with the game being surprisingly pleasant on the eye. The production values are obviously high and Studio Arctic have made good use of the Unity Engine, which deserves to be acknowledged.

 

However, what made me most uncomfortable with the game is the premise itself. Now, call me overly politically correct, but the fact that the game sets you as playing the hooligans just doesn’t sit right with me. Yes, they’ve set the hooligans as the ‘good guys’ with their alternate reality, but this feels like a post-production decision to deflect accusations of glamorising hooligan culture, rather than a genuine design choice. The fact remains that the game revels in hooligan iconography and culture, from beer and burgers as health restorers to the main antagonist group’s logo looking suspiciously like the United Nations logo.

To be honest, I found it rather uncomfortable playing the game and could never quite get over the fact I was playing as a bunch of thugs beating up police and trashing a town. That might just be me and perhaps I’m taking it all too seriously, but still, that’s how I felt.
Hooligans: The Bravest isn’t going to win any gameplay awards. However, it’s a fairly solid, if slow-paced, side-scrolling beat-em –up that’s defined (and limited) by its touch-screen controls.
While it’s not going to occupy hundreds of hours of your time, if you can look past the fairly misguided theme, it’s worth the £1.99 asking price.

If you want to give it a go, you can pick it up on iTunes here

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