I love sports games but dislike roguelites, so I hesitated picking this one up for a while, but I'm glad I finally gave it a chance.

This game has creativity and new ideas that you rarely see in today's vanilla sports games. The hockey gameplay is good enough, though it has some faults. It doesn't feel as smooth or responsive as the retro hockey games it's inspired by, and some of the puck and goalkeeper physics feel janky.

This led to me losing a lot of games where I was dominating my opponent on the ice but lost the game due to a cheap goal. With all the roguelite power-ups, luck feels more important than skill, which can lead to some frustration. I found the Easy difficulty to be too easy, while Standard felt cheap.

The early access version of the game is also quite short and low on game modes. That said, if you go into it with the mindset this is an indie sports game with some new ideas, I feel like it's worth the relatively low price of admission. Whether it eventually evolves to something greater remains to be seen, but I'm glad there are people still making sports games with original ideas.

(played on Steam Deck)