Less blood, more bowl.
Coach Kerry Batts has spent the last year in his astro-turfed football laboratory making modifications to Pro Strategy Football, the iOS gridiron sim that we anointed the second-best sports game of 2013, and I like what I’m seeing.
PSF 2013 was all about tactical play-calling, with none of the off-the-field shenanigans that occupy other sports management sims. This made PSF quite limited in some ways, but it was a finely-honed scalpel for the few things it chose to do — there’s no other American football sim that models plays as intricately and realistically. In my review, I called PSF 2013 the Dwarf Fortress of football sims, and I meant it.
Batts is planning on broadening the game’s scope in 2014 — but just a little. There’s going to be a career mode that lets you manage a team from season to season. He’s still actively developing that feature and the game will ship with a demo of it; he’s hoping that feedback from PT readers and other fans will help him shape it.
The big changes for PSF 2014 are a completely redesigned menu system (one that Batts hopes will make the game more friendly to non-football obsessives), a “Casual Mode” that streamlines play-calling and speeds up games, and an Android port that will open the game up to a whole new audience. I’ve got lots of screenshots and more details after the jump.
“Williams, you’ve been drafted by the San Francisco Stock Photos.”
Besides all of the structural changes to the UI, there’s more content in PSF 2014: new plays, three new offensive formations (Pistol, No Back, and Wildcat for you loony Tebow fans). Players will be identified by name, but the shipped version of the game won’t have real names. Each of us will have to buy 10,000 copies for Coach Batts to be able to afford that NFL license.
There’s a lot more useful information in the play-calling screens this year, and the tab-based layout should make navigating them more intuitive.
Batts has put a lot of time and effort into the new UI and it shows. PSF is no longer a one-man effort — he’s brought in a professional artist to help him design the new menus. “I brainstormed the offensive play-calling with my son and a friend a few nights during our two-week backpacking trip this summer, and completely rewrote that,” Batts told me. “I also got rid of all iOS alerts and wrote my own class for dialogs, which looks much better. I’ve also added scroll bars for pages that have more information than is visible [on one screen].”
New popup help screens.
One consistent critique of PSF 2013 was that it was a bit of an uphill climb for more casual football fans. Batts has translated that feedback into new help screens for every formation and play that give the player a better understanding of which ones are suited for different gameplay situations. If only Tom Coughlin had access to this.
Not pictured: Wes Welker’s “scoring meth” rating. (It’s a 10.)
Batts isn’t just streamlining though — there’s going to be more complexity in PSF 2014 for those of us that want it. You’ll be able to hot route every receiver on the field, and there’s more intricate clock management options coming, too. Of course, you won’t have to worry about any of this stuff if you play in Casual Mode.
Time is my side.
There’s no nailed down release date for PSF2014 yet, but Batts says he’s getting close. As with the previous installment, he’s planning a lot of post-release support and enhancements. PSF was already the most realistic and exciting football sim on mobile devices, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the new edition. We’ll keep you posted.
No comments:
Post a Comment