How much jank is too much jank? Pro Jank Footy doesn’t concern itself with accurately depicting the great game of Australian rules football. For the benefit of entertainment, it portrays what footy feels like, as both a player and a spectator. Perhaps it’s a strange thing to say about a game that can transform all players into seagulls. On the contrary, Aussie rules often looks like a flock fighting over a hot chip. Therefore, Pro Jank Footy is, in its own way, true to the source material.
Aussie rules is a notoriously difficult sport to translate into a video game. Played on a large field with 360-degree action and infamously ambiguous rules, it’s a bloody complex code.
Without the global appeal of soccer or basketball, there aren’t the mass resources to compete with the juggernauts of EA Sports FC and NBA 2K. Still, the cult-like following of footy games is dedicated; AFL Live 2004 on the PlayStation 2 is still regarded on footy forums with reverence.
So, Pro Jank Footy makes perfect sense. It’s an imperfect adaptation of an imperfect but fervently beloved sport. Conjuring nostalgia from its retro visuals and ‘bring back the biff’ gameplay, Pro Jank encapsulates Australiana sports culture (minus the deluge of gambling ads) and humour better than any game before it.
Putting the jank in footy
Pro Jank Footy isn’t a complex game at its core. Like the real sport, all you need to do is kick an egg-shaped ball through two big sticks and prevent the opposing team from doing the same. Simple. Kicking and handballing use the same button, with little else to commit to memory. Like I said, simple.
But, also like the real sport, Pro Jank Footy doesn’t make this objective easy. However, instead of navigating forward presses, spare men down back, and zone defences, you face dimension-altering portals, fake blue screens of death, and a muscle-bound football mascot who thirsts for violence.
After one team scores a goal, the opponent chooses one of three randomly presented power-ups. Some boost your performance, like increasing how long your sprint lasts, while others inhibit the other team, like removing their arms so they can’t mark the ball. You can also collect power-ups during play by picking up one of the many meat pies with legs that run onto the field.
Pro Jank Footy is extremely silly. It also leans heavily into the ‘jank’ in its name. Swapping between players on the field is unreliable, often changing automatically at inopportune moments or picking the wrong player. There’s no way to back out of team selection without exiting the game entirely, nor was it possible to manually select a stadium (which consists of a legally distinct version of the MCG, a random shopping centre car park, and the literal beach at Christies Beach). Other little details grate, too, like scoring a point when hitting the behind post, instead of awarding a free kick.
Most of these annoyances don’t account for much, though. It might not look it on the surface, but Pro Jank Footy is smart. If it can’t recreate the sport precisely, it may as well be damn funny.
Footy with friends
Pre-launch, online multiplayer was harder to sit through than a contest between Essendon and Richmond. Lag, latency, and non-stop free kicks prevented any sort of flow. One match crashed before completion, leaving its result forever in limbo. Steam’s Remote Play Together feature, which simulates a local multiplayer session over the internet, fared much better.
On the single-player side of things, Pro Jank’s season mode is fairly limited, loading you up with some power-ups to play against a series of automated opponents. Without human opponents to riff on, the chaos loses some of its spontaneity — this is a game best enjoyed with mates.
On the couch, though, with a group of footy-loving friends, Pro Jank Footy soared higher than Tony Modra. Part of this stems from the sheer absurdity of the gameplay. Running down players in a beat-up sedan while your opponent drifts around as a shopping trolley is outrageously funny.
Pro Jank’s power-ups level the playing field better than any AFL equalisation policy could hope to achieve. No matter the margin, you’re only ever one meat pie away from resetting the scores to zero, tripling the value of goals, or jumping into a game of Pong to decide the outcome.
Both the utility and hilarity of each power-up feels like playing an elaborate sports-themed improv game of ‘yes, and’. Most abilities are helpful (or detrimental for opponents), but more importantly, every ability is wildly entertaining. It’s hard to care about winning and losing when you’re doubled over with laughter, which Pro Jank Footy has a knack for.
Broden Kelly’s (of Aunty Donna fame) full-throated performance as the game’s commentator compounds the silliness twofold. I haven’t heard such unhinged commentary since hearing complaints about alimony payments in a copy of Cricket 96 I got for free in a box of Weet-Bix.
Jank by name and jank by nature, Pro Jank Footy succeeds as both a work of comedy and as a cultural reflection of Australia’s unique sport. Just as importantly, it makes me want to bounce that pill.
Pro Jank Footy was reviewed on PC with a code supplied by the publisher.
The post Pro Jank Footy review: Aussie rules has never been so funny appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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