Yesterday I wrote about trying to play a rugby video game, which is both a sport and a video game genre that I don’t really get. Folks on social media had recommendations for other rugby games, most of which were made decades ago on platforms I don’t have access to. Then, NoClip’s Danny O’Dwyer recommended Pro Jank Footy, a game about an entirely different sport I also don’t get. After spending last night with the demo, I still do not get it, but Pro Jank Footy is pretty cool.
Pro Jank Footy is an upcoming game about Australian rules football. What is Australian rules football? I don’t know, and had to rush to YouTube to watch explainers before I felt like I had enough of a grasp to even open the game. It’s… sorta like rugby, in that the ball is the same, but it’s played on an oval field and involves kicking a ball through goal posts to score different amounts of points, and also you can stand on other people I guess?
Luckily you don’t need to know terribly much about this to play Pro Jank Footy, which is styled like a retro sports game and doesn’t go in for all the nitty-gritty that’s tripping me up about rugby games. The mechanics are simple, with the same controller buttons doing different things depending on if you tap or hold: tap A to get the ball or hold A to kick it, tap B to nudge an opponent or hold B to tackle them. You can switch between your players or let the game auto-select one; I sometimes found the auto-select a little confusing or sluggish, not picking the player closest to the ball in time for me to fend off my opponents, but other than that the demo was pretty easy to pick up and play.
Pro Jank Footy’s big twist is that when a team scores a goal (as opposed to a “behind,” another kind of goal this sport I have just learned about has), their opponent has to pick from one of three cards that change how the game is played. Cards can make players bigger or smaller, remove everyone’s arms, add a third team to the field, deploy a bouncing DVD menu that blocks the action, and more. Sometimes these are just weird and chaotic, but other times they can give you an advantage or disadvantage, making you or your opponent kick farther or run faster. You can also play the demo without these cards, but I didn’t play this mode; I figured as long as I was trying new things, I might as well go all in.
Adding a bunch of chaos to a game about a sport I am utterly unfamiliar with made for a confusing but really delightful experience. I could just lean in to my bafflement, floundering after the ball as my choices made the field grow increasingly crowded and pleasantly frantic. I lost ferociously in every game I played, but rather than being frustrating it felt exciting, my humiliating losses offset by the game's charming humor and energy. As O’Dwyer wrote, the game “puts fun first,” not trying to be a sports sim and instead just being a relatively simple explosion of noise and speed and weirdness.
Pro Jank Footy has a planned release date of 2026 for PC and consoles, and there’s a demo available now as part of Steam Next Fest.
Riley MacLeod
