Wild Card Football Review: A True Wild Card

It’s been nineteen years since Electronic Arts bought the exclusive license to make NFL games and nineteen years since the last great football game. Without competition, Madden’s quality has fallen off a cliff, and even arcade football experiences haven’t been able to fill the gap. Wild Card Football is the first attempt in years at an honest-to-goodness arcade-style football game, and while it may not nail everything, it provides a mostly entertaining experience that fans of the sport will want to check out.

Over The Top Action

The core football here has a lot of similarities to classic arcade football experiences like NFL Blitz. Big, over-the-top action where players make impossible catches, break through the line and run rampant, and take massive tackles that send them sprawling onto the ground. You won’t find the truly over-the-top hits those games often featured. No one is getting pile driven onto their head or lit on fire. We know too much about CTE nowadays for that to be fun or for anything remotely related to the NFL to allow for that, but the action is exaggerated and a lot of fun.

Each side has seven players instead of the traditional eleven, which opens the field up and makes room for these comically oversized versions of real NFL players. Both sides are on even ground, so the action doesn’t feel too lopsided. Yes, the offense has things easier, but that’s always been true of football games and is really true in real football as well. Defenses are far from defenseless, however, which is what you need.

Passing plays require good timing if you want to avoid them being broken up, but the passing game here feels excellent, and hitting a receiver in stride and going for a big play can’t help but put a smile on your face. Running plays have an interesting mechanic where you can time a button press at the handoff of the ball to get a boost of speed, which will help you blow through the defense. The timing is pretty precise, perhaps a bit too much for an arcade experience, but it does keep this from feeling automatic and makes running plays less of a sure thing, which I do approve of. No matter what play call you go with though, the action here feels smooth and fast-paced while being easy to pick up and play. It’s everything other modern football games haven’t been in recent years.

Draw Four

The big twist in Wild Card Football comes in the wild cards themselves. Before each play, each team can pick from several cards from their deck. These cards make changes to the upcoming play for both sides. Maybe the defense makes the offense 50% less likely to catch a pass. Or the offense gives themselves a speed boost. Some of the plays get far more wild, like turning a player invisible or making them grow to a larger size. They’re an interesting concept, and some of the impacts are fun, but my biggest issue with this system is that it hurts the game’s pacing. Selecting your play and your card often takes longer than the actual play itself, leading to a fast-paced arcade-style game where it often feels like you spend more time in menus than on the field in the game’s already short quarters. You can turn the wild cards off if you choose, leaving a more straightforward arcade experience, but that leaves things feeling a bit simple.

Letting the game get that simple can be an issue, too, because the amount of things to do is pretty simple, too. Outside of exhibitions, you have a season mode where you pick a team of your choice and go for the championship, but this may be the simplest season mode ever. It’s a series of matches with no management of any sort. There’s also the Dream Team mode, where you open packs of cards and build a team with what you find within. While this is a clear knockoff of modes like Ultimate Team in other sports games, the lack of microtransactions is nice. You’re effectively opening loot boxes, but everyone will be on an equal footing in getting them. The pace you unlock them at, however, still kind of feels like its balanced, as if players could buy more packs, meaning things feel like a bit of a slog. I appreciate the commitment to the card concept here, delivering on it in multiple ways, but in truth, I just wanted to play more football.

NFL fans will find a mostly familiar group of teams, even if they won’t find those teams’ logos or names. Wild Card Football doesn’t have the NFL license, but they do have a license with the NFL Player’s Association. That means the actual NFL players are here, sorted into their actual teams, but those teams can’t use their names, colors, or logos. Instead, the teams are named after their quarterbacks. The colors seem like they’re mostly trying to be as close as they can be to the actual team colors as they can get without being sued. You also have access in many modes to famous players no longer in the league, such as Colin Kaepernick, who is front and center in the game’s marketing. It’s cool to play as your favorite players, even if Patriots fans could perhaps do without playing a team named after Mac Jones at the moment.

Conclusion

Wild Card Football is the most fun I’ve had with a football game in the last decade. That says more about the poor state of sports games than it does about the game itself, but fans of the sport will find a fun pick-up-and-play arcade experience here, which is great for casual play, even if the available modes are lacking and the wild card system isn’t as successful as I’d like. Wild Card Football won’t provide a ton of depth or reward careful planning, but if you need something fun to play with casual friends at halftime, you should absolutely give it a look.

Final Verdict: 3.5/5

Available on: PS5 (Reviewed), PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch, PC; Publisher: Saber Interactive; Developer: Saber Interactive; Players: 2; Released: October 10th, 2023; ESRB: E for Everyone; MSRP: $39.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Wild Card Football provided by the publisher.