Attempts to create a vaguely realistic football game for the iPad have thus far fallen flat. The iPad versions of both the FIFA and Pro Evo felt like little more than lazy cash-ins rather than quality titles. The latest Kick Flick Football offers an alternative to the 11-on-11 football simulators and focuses solely on finger-flick free kicks. While it doesn’t even try to be the most realistic footy game out there, it inadvertently is the best.
The beauty of Kick Flick Football is that while it’s simple enough to kick a ball by swiping it with your finger, it takes time to become a master of the art. The trajectory of your shot is affected by which part of the ball you kick, how hard you swipe at it, and how you curl it just after the kick. The sensitivity of the ball to these variables makes Kick Flick a deceptively technical game that’s as close as flicking your finger could possibly get you to taking a real free kick.
Kick Flick has a unique futuristic feel about it, with the pitch seemingly floating in darkness against a nocturnal urban skyline. While the ball and pitch look traditional, the goal and defenders look like they’ve been sketched with a neon pen; bizarre, nonsensical, but somehow it works. There are a few different game modes to play around with, namely ’10 Kicks’, ‘5 lives’ and ‘sudden death’; self-explanatory, no?
Automated replays every time you score a goal mean that you can relive those sublime set-pieces in slow-motion; though it would be nice if you could save your finest goals so that you can prove to your friends what a pathetic loser you are by getting excited over something so trivial. Kick Flick is one of the most painfully addictive iPad games out there. It’s not long before I stopped indulging in the replays of my goals because I was just itching to take my next shot. Sure, no addiction is ever healthy, but at a one-off cost of £0.59 it’s a cheap habit.
