Tackle for Loss

When you tell me that your new game is a cross between Hotline Miami and football, I have to admit that you have my full, undivided attention. What does that mash-up even mean? Is it an acid-fueled sports sim starring a psychopath killer or an action game with a weird sports theme. As it turns out, Tackle for Loss is the latter, a Hotline Miami clone starring a football player with a whole bunch of sports-related upgrades and abilities. It’s the kind of mash-up that shouldn’t work, yet with its twisted story and fast-paced gameplay, it does. Yeah, we have a lot to talk about when I review Tackle for Loss by Indifferent Penguin.

Where do I even begin with this game? If we boil it down to a simple set-up, then this is the story of a football player who is on a mission to find his missing daughter, Sara. To get her back, he goes on a series of increasingly chaotic missions that allow him to use his football skills to murder a bunch of gangsters, ninjas and assassins. In other words, it’s exactly like Hotline Miami, only now with a fun sports theme and a hero who wears a helmet instead of an animal mask.

The similarity is also in its dark and excessively violent story, which sends the athlete down a path full of bad memories. We quickly realize that there’s more going on than a simple father searching for his missing daughter, and perhaps our hero isn’t as well-meaning as he thinks. The stages are based on these memories, sending him on a hallucinatory revenge mission where nothing is what it appears and nobody can be trusted.

Just like Hotline Miami, the goal is to rush into a level and murder everybody before they kill you. This is made a lot harder because it only takes a single bullet shot or dog bite to take out our hero, so you’ll need to get them before they get you. But because this is football-themed, you only have four “downs” to eliminate everybody in a single level. At first that means that you can only rush at the enemies a total of four times, however, you’ll quickly earn an upgrade that will add a play meter, allowing you to link kills together into one big combo before the time runs out. In other words, you’ll want to kill three or four people in a single play, that way you still have three downs to work with. If you run out of downs without taking out all of the bad guys, then it’s game over and you’ll have to try that level all over again.

Although arbitrary, this limitation does make Tackle for Loss feel a bit more like a puzzle game. A lot of your time will be finding the right time to attack multiple people before your combo expires. It’s easy early on when there are only a few guards in a tight space, but the locations will open up and add a lot more enemies to deal with. There are a lot of times where it feels like having four plays isn’t going to be enough to kill everybody.

Thankfully, you’ll be able to buy upgrades and new abilities along the way, most of which are taken straight out of a football game. For example, you’ll be able to throw a football to distract the guards or tackle the enemies in an especially brutal way. You’ll juke, stiff arm and hurdle to mix up the action and gain an advantage on the opponents. This not only helps to add some much-needed depth to the gameplay, but also reinforces the football theme.

My issue with these different moves and upgrades is that there’s very little incentive to use them. Take the decoy football as an example. In theory, you can toss the ball one direction move the enemies around the stage, but you’re also penalized for doing that, since it costs a play just to throw the decoy. The same is true for all of the other abilities, both defensive and offensive in nature. I found that I was better off memorizing the different attack styles and waiting for an opening to strike. Aside from using the run move and ability to temporarily pause the combo timer, I found that I barely used the new moves that I worked hard to unlock. That’s a shame.

We also need to talk about the level designs. While I like that we get to bust heads across a wide variety of locations, I found some of the stage designs to be a bit samey. And I mean that in the sense that many of the individual levels are indistinguishable from the stage that came before it (and the one that will come after it). And it’s not just the layout of the levels, but also where the enemies are placed. This ultimately feels like filler, where the developer worried that the game would be too short if you only had to complete each stage once, so let’s just add a few more carbon copies to fill up the run time. It would have been better if each mission had four or five unique stages to complete.

The other problem is a bit more obvious – this game is incredibly derivative of Hotline Miami. In fact, I have no problem straight-up calling it a clone. Sure, there are some fun sports-themed upgrades and changes to the gameplay, but you’re never going to be able to shake the feeling that you’ve done this all before. Even the story and the character’s descent into madness that is both predictable and familiar. This is a game that is desperately in need of its own identity.

Still, even with these issues, I can’t deny that Tackle for Loss is a lot of fun. Sure, it’s probably because this style of action game is inherently tense and exciting, but I would like to believe that developer Indifferent Penguin has done a good job of recreating what makes those games work. It’s not especially original and the football theme feels more like a tacked-on gimmick than a real shift for the genre, but it never fumbles what’s important.