Ludometrics, the Glasgow-based developer of games including Bips, This Ways Down, Gridlock and Sock Monster, has announced its next project – Bodycheck.
It’s an entirely new take on football (aka soccer for our international readers), which is quite difficult to imagine. After all, hasn’t football been done now? Playing AND managing? Quite successfully too?
Bodycheck approaches football’s historical origins. Back in the middle ages, villagers and small towns relaxed between dying of plague, malnutrition or witchcraft by staging enormous climactic ‘football’ matches which featured dozens, if not hundreds of players, three, four or more teams, a pigs head instead of a ball and a rather more relaxed attitude to rules than today’s premier prima donnas would be comfortable with.
It combines the best elements of football, with a very large dash of rugby (like American Football, but without unnecessary padding and stop/start gameplay) and a pinch of a good old fashioned riot. Punching, biting, gouging, scratching, tripping, tackling, kicking, tearing, snapping are positively encouraged.
Just to push things further and turn the mayhem up to 11, Ludometrics is also promising a healthy dose of sorcery and witchcraft, allowing players to cast spells on opponents, resurrect players who have been inconveniently stamped to death and use magical items such as a ‘portable hole’. At the time of writing there was no confirmation that the half time pies may also feature tail of rat or eyeball of toad, though this is widely considered likely.
In short it sounds like splendid fun and the sort of sport football should once more aspire to.
Bodycheck is heading for Sony’s PlayStation VITA and is due out around Q3 (the end of summer, or autumn) 2014. There’s no word on price, or number of players yet, but Ludometrics has promised regular updates over the next several months, which we will certainly be stealing, sharing and claiming as our own hard work.
It is of course well known that every human male outside the United States of America must, by law, adore and worship football as the one true purpose of life. This makes football games one of the most popular genres in gaming.
It is a brave company indeed which enters the football stadium and and treats the sport as something which could be fun or entertaining. Ludometrics is the sort of broken-nosed, cauliflower-eared professional bruiser of a company we believe can slip on the knuckle dusters, pocket a discrete cosh and drag today’s professional football, kicking and screaming back into the 16th century.
Don’t believe us? Check out the first footage…
