Developer: Gamujan, SFL Interactive
Publisher: Maximum Games
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Tested on: PS4
Street Power Football – Review
FIFA Street was a big hit back in the days. It has been a long time since a comparable title came out after the release of the last game in this franchise. With FIFA 20 adding Volta Football, Street Power Football came out just a year too late to avoid competition from one of the biggest football game developers. Street Power Football tries to deliver a street football experience with different game modes known to many, but sadly has a lot of shortcomings in gameplay and physics.
Story
Street Power Football has the game mode called Become King. This basically is the game’s story mode and as you start it, the one and only Sean Garnier, one of the big names in this world comes to greet you and talks about his passion and Street Power Football. He will take you through the tutorial and will then set you loose upon the world. Aside of Sean Garnier, there are 37 other characters to play as, who are all stars in the street football business. The Become King mode is just a series of challenges that take you through all the game modes while Sean Garnier will sometimes start talking to you for a bit.
Graphics
Street Power Football is designed in a cartoony type of art style which shows every street football star in a decent cartoony version of themselves. The game provides thirteen different locations of which some, you could even recognize. Certainly, some locations look better than others, but they look quite okay. The tricks you can perform may look quite awesome when you see them in trailers for this game, they mostly look awful as they are poorly executed with characters and balls just spawning to the correct position for the trick making it very buggy. Walking and running around the field also looks quite ‘fake’ as players seem to slide across the field making it feel like a poorly executed Michael Jackson move.
Sound
You could say that the entire music library in Street Power Football is one of its strongest points in the whole game. It has a lot of popular songs that fit the genre and style of the game perfectly and make the game just a bit more fun to play. Sadly, even in this department, not everything is good as you can clearly see and hear that Sean Garnier’s speech was recorded in French and just dubbed in English, while the English version of this game will be the most played one worldwide.
Gameplay
As the title already states, Street Power Football is a sports game that purely focuses on street football. The game features several different game modes that will sound familiar to most of the football fans. Street Power Football has four game modes that effectively feel like just one main game mode, a small adaptation to this game mode and two minigames based on real-life skill challenges. This game deals with a lot of problems with defending vanishing balls and poorly executed animations and this is seen in all multiplayer modes.
Firstly, there’s the Street Power game mode that offers matches in 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 formats where the goal is to score five goals against your opponent(s). Playing this in a 1v1 format can be quite boring and making one mistake will almost always lead to your opponent scoring as there is no way to recover fast enough to counter your opponent’s actions. Combine this with the poorly performed tricks mentioned before, this game mode is definitely not fun. Sadly, with all this, Street Power is still one of the most fun game modes to play in this game.
The Panna game mode is a small adaptation to the Street Power game mode where you only play in 1v1 formats inside a smaller arena where scoring goals won’t be the only way to score. In this game mode, you won’t only earn points by scoring goals, as you can score two points by skillfully playing the ball through the legs of your opponent. You do this by performing a series of button presses and the one that hits the most button correct wins the sequence and a Panna will be made or performed. Each time a goal or Panna is scored, the game will be paused shortly, which is very annoying.
The other two game modes, Freestyle and Trick Shot only feel as cheap minigames that aren’t even worth playing. The Trick Shot mode requires you to shoot your ball against chairs, cones and inside trash cans. You need to do this from predetermined positions where you can’t walk around with an aiming system that definitely doesn’t work as well as the developers would’ve wanted. After finishing all the objects in an area, your character will walk to the next one, which again looks very poorly animated. Lastly, there’s the Freestyle mode which allows you to show off your best tricks in a rhythm, which makes this game mode feel like a bad imitation of Guitar Hero with a ball.
Conclusion
In short, Street Power Football is a big disappointment in terms of gameplay. With a small repertoire of tricks, poorly executed animations in all game modes, and game modes that won’t even fully classify as minigames, there’s not much fun to do in this game. For those who really want to play street football in a video game, you’re better of trying out the Volta game mode in FIFA 20 or even dust of your old PS2 and play the original FIFA Street as that relic was already more elaborate than this poor attempt at making a clone.
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