Classic game designer Jon Hare along with Finnish studio Combo Breaker have announced that the spiritual successor to Sensible World of Soccer, Sociable Soccer, will launch on Steam Early Access later this summer. To celebrate they've released a new trailer for the game. The full commercial launch of the game will follow later this year.
Everything we know on Sociable Soccer!
Check out our list of the Best Sports Games on PC!
Sociable Soccer had an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign back in 2015 and we haven't really heard much from it since. Jon Hare and Combo Breaker have apparently been working on the game in silence (seriously, the last Kickstarter update was August last year) ever since, so it's good to see the game coming back. There have been plenty of successful Kickstarters failing to deliver in the news recently, such as Unsung Story and The Mandate, so maybe Kickstarter isn't the positive thing many people once thought.
Sociable Soccer is described by Jon Hare thusly:
"Sociable Soccer is a super quick, adrenaline soaked football action game, an unholy alliance of Guardiola’s tiki taka and Klopp’s gegenpressing, where ultra sharp passing and shooting can easily be thwarted by a well timed slide tackle... something like Rocket League in boots"
Jon Hare is of course the veteran designer behind the likes of Microprose Soccer, Cannon Fodder and Sensible World of Soccer. Combo Breaker is a new studio made up of developers who have worked on the likes of Max Payne, Tomb Raider, Alan Wake and even Angry Birds. Jon says, "the team behind Sociable Soccer is a combination of the very best of British design, Finnish engineering and French art” Indeed.
Sociable Soccer will boast online and offline matches, over 1,000 club and national teams from around the world and over 30,000 players, and the ability to customize teams and players, hopefully to the degree of something like Fire Pro Wrestling. It will feature single player and manager modes too.
If it's anything like Sensible Soccer it will extremely easy to pick up and play, difficult to master, with a huge range of options available. Honestly, I'm personally not a sports fan, especially not football/soccer, and I can honestly say the only football/soccer game I've ever loved and been able to enjoy is Sensible Soccer on the Amiga. And that includes Rocket League. As such, we'll be keeping a close eye on Sociable Soccer to see if it recaptures that ol' Sensible magic.
