A new football season has started – great for those of you who like watching a gang of dimwits earn more in an hour than you do in a year so they can keep their clueless WAGs in designer chavwear, but less great for the rest of us.
What we need is something that takes football back to the grassroots, but also something that is a) free and b) computer-based so we don't have to go outside and get muddy and cold and breathless and stuff. And that's exactly what Kicks is. Still in open beta, Kicks is Gametribe's new free-to-download football MMO that will have you playing seamless five-a-side matches against some of the 300,000 players who've already downloaded the game. Needless to say we've become cripplingly addicted to Kicks but, by Christ, we just wish we were better at it.
MMOs – that's Massively Multiplayer Online games to you – are big in Asia. Huge, in fact, as anyone who's been forced to wait for a PC in a smoke-filled Seoul internet cafe for 30 minutes while hundreds of daylight-shunning Koreans thump away at World Of Warcraft will attest. But the thing about MMOs is that, by and large, they're all endlessly geeky, primarily about orcs and runes and crap, and take about three years of play to actually work out what's going on. But Kicks, despite being an MMO, is none of these things. Kicks is a straight-up five-a-side football game that'll have you participating in matches within minutes of downloading it.
One of the things we like best about Kicks is that you can create your own character and stick with them throughout. Although it's a five-a-side game, you'll only ever control one player in Kicks – yourself. Your teammates and opponents are made of some of the other hundreds of thousands of Kicks players who've already downloaded the game. This means that you can concentrate on customising and improving one player and one player alone – and that in itself is more fun than should be allowed. Just about every aspect of the Kicks character is open to alteration – hair, clothes, accessories – plus when you start earning points by passing, tackling and scoring, you can put them towards one of the many mind-blowing skill moves available to you.
And all this is before you've even started playing Kicks. Jump into a public game – or create a password-protected game for you and your mates – and you'll be thrust onto one of several beautiful pitches where the games take place. As for the Kicks games themselves – well, once you've managed to figure out the keyboard control system without looking down or trying to remember if it's D or S that shoots before inevitably hitting the wrong one and fluffing your chance, the matches flow superbly. Before long, you and your Kicks teammates will be piecing together defence-obliterating moves and scoring goals that'll make Ronaldo look like the preening prettyboy that he knows he is deep down. Look…
Possibly best of all, Kicks is still in open beta. That means that, while there's still the occasional bug that needs to be ironed out, you have the power to download Kicks, play Kicks and then make suggestions on how to improve Kicks before it gets a full release. You can bet your arse that the Gametribe people are reading this, so any suggestions you have can be left as a comment below. And there's even talk of rewarding the best suggestion with a special skill-move named after whoever thought of it.
You could do a whole lot worse than to download Kicks now. And we'll see you on the pitch, so long as you promise to go easy on us.
Jeff H says
I downloaded this game and it is amazing!!! Definately a must play!!!
Kaziggly Rat says
Where’s the “football” game?
The You-Tube link shows some kind of crappy soccer game.
bobski says
I downloaded the game from http://www.gametribe.com it’s amazing. i’m setting up my virtual 5-a-side team!!!!!