I grew up watching football, was lucky enough to see a couple of Super Bowl wins for my home Steelers before moving away from the area, and then promptly losing interest since there were no streaming options at the time (and NFL Sunday Ticket was absurdly expensive, just like it still is today.) Now living back in a city with an NFL team, though, last season my SO wanted to watch some of the games, and I immediately became hooked again. We ended up watching every game last season, and this season I have tickets to see the Bengals in my first ever in-person NFL game.
Since sports aren’t happening literally all the time for me to watch, that means I also want to play some sports games. I play a decent bit of MLB The Show 24 on our Nintendo Switch, but unfortunately the Madden series isn’t available on that platform (and probably for good reason considering how janky some of The Show looks on lower end hardware of the Switch.)
To get my football fix, last season I played a lot of Retro Bowl on my phone. It’s basically a modern take on Tecmo Bowl, and I had a blast playing it through several seasons. The idea is that you start off as a new head coach in the league with a fairly lackluster team that you build up over time through a combination of player development and good draft choices. You can either take a bad team and turn it into a champion or you can get them good enough that you accept an offer from another team (probably your favorite) and swap there. The main downside was that the game was not NFL licensed. This means that you weren’t the Cincinnati Bengals, you were just Cincinnati. You had the same colors, but the “Bengals” name was never used, the logo never appeared, etc. This was especially awful for cities like New York that have multiple teams, resulting in literally “New York A” and “New York B”. Likewise, when you started with a team, the players would just be randomly generated; they weren’t a snapshot of the current team.
Then I saw several weeks ago that a major overhaul was coming to turn Retro Bowl into NFL Retro Bowl 25. This iteration includes full licensing from the NFL and NFLPA, meaning that both the teams and the players can be represented. It released on September 5th, and I’ve been having a blast with it ever since.
The formula is largely the same as the previous game. The main differences are:
- Teams have their full, proper names. This includes on-field paint at the end zones and the middle of the field.
- When you start with a team, you have actual stars from that team’s current NFL roster. Given the “25” moniker, I would imagine this could be a yearly thing going forward with updated rosters at the start of each season.
Beyond that, you still start with a lower-performing team (or you can opt to jump straight to your favorite team, though that’s less fun) and begin your climb to glory. As in the previous game, you never play defense; you actively play offense and the defensive plays will simple tell you what happened based on a combination of RNG and player stats. To be clear, you still have defensive players on your roster (or at least you probably should) so their stats still matter.
Offense is super fun, with a mix of running and passing options available on every play. Plays will always offer the option to run or pass, though the receiver routes can be wildly different. You get the option to call an audible if you don’t like how your play lines up against the defense’s formation or if you need a deep pass without a route performing that, but you’re limited in how many audibles you can call per-half. The number is dictated by the overall skill level of your QB. A rookie may only get one audible per half while a veteran may have 4.
Passing involves dragging your thumb on the screen to create an arc from the QB to the receiver. As in real life, you need to have a rough idea of how quickly your receiver runs, especially on deep routes, so you know how far to lead the runner. The accuracy of the arc on the screen and how far the QB is able to throw the ball are both dependent upon the QB’s stats.
Most players have stats in:
- Catching
- Strength
- Speed
- Stamina
Instead of “Catching”, QBs and Kickers have “Accuracy”. Defensive players have “Tackling.” Catching allows players to dive, leap, and have a better chance of catching a closely thrown pass than the defender. Strength allows players to break tackles or make tackles against weaker opponents. Speed allows receives and backs to run more quickly or stop a slower runner on defense. Stamina allows players to maintain their level of performance longer, be it running, passing, tackling, or kicking.
As players gain experience, you can choose to level up these different aspects. Different players have a different skill cap in each area, though, so you can’t simply max out a given stat all the time. Players also have a maximum number of levels, represented by stars, that they’ll be capable of reaching. This is particularly important in the draft where you can scout players to see not just their current skill level but what their ceiling is. It’s obviously better to draft someone who can be a 4.5 star QB than one who can only attain being a 3 star QB.
Once a play is in action and someone has the ball, they automatically run toward the end zone. Swiping up will make the runner cut to the top of the screen while swiping down will make the player cut to the bottom of the screen. This can be super useful for things like dodging defenders, aligning a running back with a whole in the line better, or even maneuvering out of bounds to stop the clock. Swiping forward will dive, allowing a little extra yardage for a close first down or touchdown.
While there’s a lot you can configure in the settings, the default is to play 4 quarters that are 2 minutes long. As a result, games fly by pretty quickly, especially when you consider that you’re not playing out the instances where you’re on defense. I think it’s a good default that allows for meaningful games (you can still score 5 or 6 touchdowns in this span of time) that can also provide some nail-biters that require careful clock management. Real football strategies like opting to run the ball more to drain the clock definitely apply in scenarios where you can take the lead with a score but don’t want to give your opponent enough time to drive down the field and either take the lead themselves or tie things up.
You play through a normal NFL season, including your bye week and the playoffs if your record is good enough. This is important since players have an overall condition level that they can recover between games. How much they recover is based on both how hard you have players train between weeks (light, normal, or heavy) and the condition of your facilities. After games, you earn money, called Coaching Credits, that can be used to update your stadium (to keep fan morale higher, and thus keep them more likely to attend and spend money at games, translating to more money for you per game), training facilities (gives players more experience to level up more quickly), and your rehab facilities (allows players to recover more between weeks.) There are plenty of other things to spend money on, like raising the salary cap and picking up free agents, but those are expensive activities you won’t be able to afford until you have at least a handful of seasons under your belt.
Similar to the original Retro Bowl, the draft just features random players since there’s no way they can know who will be in the next draft. At that point, you start replacing some stars (either because they under performed, their contract is expiring and they’re getting older, or you just can’t afford them due to the cap), so after a few seasons, you may have fewer real players on your team than made up ones. This is especially true because one of the changes to the system is that you can only have 10 players on your roster now instead of the previous 12.
While the gameplay is mostly the same as Retro Bowl, I think there’s been some tweaking under the hood for NFL Retro Bowl 25. By default, the game’s difficulty is set to Dynamic. This means that the more you win, the more the difficulty ramps up. If you lose, it ramps down. I love this setting in sports games, so I’d recommend using it to avoid just curb stomping every team you face. In most seasons, you’re going to have a more high powered offense than defense. This is because you actually play on offense, so you’re going to pick better players to have fun with. While you’ll still have some defensive players, the smaller number means your defense will be weaker. In the original game, this lead to the dynamic difficulty scaling up to the point where the opposing team would score a touchdown on literally every drive. Your only way to win would be to also score a touchdown on every drive and use clock management to ensure that you either won the game or tied. That eventually got pretty tiring to me since there was very little variation in each game, regardless of the team or the players on it.
In the new game, things seem to be a little more dynamic, no pun intended. Defenses have a better chance of making a clutch sack or interception even against a higher powered offense. This goes both ways, as with a higher difficulty even lower-rated defenders seem to be able to keep up better with super speedy receivers, making clutch passes more difficult and risky. I actually really like this aspect since it’s both more representative of how the game actually is in real life and is more fun to play. You’ll end up with games where you lose because their defense made an amazing play, and you’ll blow out games where your defense consistently forced punts and turnovers. Most of the time, you’ll have close games that come down to the wire.
Overall, NFL Retro Bowl 25 is a super fun improvement to the already terrific original game. It keeps the same, excellent formula and gameplay, adds in the flair of official NFL licensing, and continues to provide hours of quick fun. If you’re a football fan, I’d highly recommend it. This is especially true if you’re an Apple Arcade user like myself (either directly or as a part of an Apple One subscription) since it’s available there for no additional cost.