Pro Jank Footy Is A Game Of Two Halves

Before we go anywhere with these impressions, let me get something important out of the way: Despite being the lone Australian on staff, I hate Australian Rules Football. It's a dumb sport! I hate the way everyone runs around never being able to hang onto the ball properly, I hate how it rewards misses, I hate how despite being a sport with tackling nobody ever tackles and, most of all, I hate the crap songs teams sing at the end of a game.

(Australians will know this isn't an outrageous take; despite being the country's most popular sport overall, I live in one of the three states/territories where it's not #1).

So despite my nationality and love of sports I am against the odds not your guy for a nuanced, expert take on how this recreates Australian Rules, or pays homage to its culture. I'm just looking at this as a sports video game guy, and from the same distance I would, say, an ice hockey game, a sport so foreign to me that Americans and Canadians are probably wondering why I had to call it ice hockey (here, "hockey" is what we call field hockey).

Unlike Riley, then, I was not exactly excited to try out Pro Jank Footy! At least, not from a sports game angle. The Australian Football League (AFL) has never really had a breakout video game success like rival sporting codes have in this country, despite several attempts, partly because it's a very hard game to turn into a digital experience (as we'll get to in a minute!), and partly because by virtue of it being a sport only played in Australia it's never had the money or sales potential of games based on Rugby League, Rugby Union or Cricket. Which coupled with not being into the sport itself means I have never had a good time playing an AFL game.

Pro Jank Footy does not change this. As a sports game--even a casual one--it's difficult to play, not because it's hard, but because a combination of the rules of the sport and the way it's been designed are a constant frustration. Take "marking", for example, a rule in the AFL that works like a fair catch does in the NFL, where if a kick is caught nobody is allowed to tackle the player catching the ball, only here it happens all the time in open play. It's really boring when a team is able to string them together successively, in ways that will probably make sense to an AFL fan, but which were deeply annoying to me, a person trying to enjoy a fast-paced video game.

It's bigger problem, though, is player-switching. In most sports games the speed and accuracy of player-switching, mostly on defence, is everything. If the button designed to snap your control to the nearest, most appropriate defender doesn't work as intended then you simply can't defend, and I've lost count of the number of goals I've conceded in Pro Jank Footy because it's switching my control to a player with no hope of intervening in the play. I don't know if this is something inherent in the flow of Australian Rules Football or just something that needed more work on the development side, but I haven't sworn this much at a sports game in years.

Were this an actual sports video game, then, I'd be pretty down on it! Especially since it's unlicensed, the roster of teams is limited, there's not much meat to it beyond 1v1 games and a basic arcade mode and it's carrying the issues I've listed above. Lucky for all of us, then, nothing I've said so far means a damn thing. That's all between me, God and a sport I don't like. Pro Jank Footy is not– and you have may have already picked up on this--a real sports video game.

I mean it is, and those things are still annoying, but look at this game. Pro Jank Footy has almost no interest in recreating this sport accurately, it has the word Jank in the name for God's sake. This is a 90s arcade sports game come to life, a proud descendant of not just NBA Jam, but everything from Super Baseball 2020 to Super Sidekicks to NFL Blitz. Pro Jank doesn't want to respect the intricacies of Australia Rules Football, it wants to make you yell at a screen with a friend, maybe after a beer or three, while laughing your arse off the whole time.

Aunty Donna's Broden Kelly is on the mic and delivers one of not just the funniest but also legitimately most enthusiastic sports game commentary performances I have ever heard. Even if you don't get the (sometimes very) Australian jokes being delivered multiple times per minute, every game, look at the work being put in here and compare it to the dull, lifeless lines being read out for NBA2K and EAFC:

If you are going to pay homage to a golden generation of S-tier arcade sports games, a genre not exactly known for its subtlety, then a very good way of doing so is to show the same sense of abandon and just go all out. There's a CRT filter enabled by default that I've left on the entire time, the in-game visuals are wonderfully crunchy and Pro Jank's more arcade elements--like power-up cards that do everything from turning players into giants to sending flocks of seagulls onto the field to dropping a bouncing DVD logo onto the screen--do exactly what they're supposed to do: annoy you constantly while also being extremely funny

Its final success, and this is a difficult balance to strike, is being an Australian video game without being too Australian. I wrote about this a while back with The Drifter and the same applies here: This is a game that's proudly and confidently for Australians, yet doesn't resort to any tired cliches or pandering to international sensibilities. It just makes Bunnings sausage sandwich jokes and if you get them you get them, and if you don't you're just left wondering why there's a team called the 'Snags', and what a snag even is.

Leave the CRT filter on, this is a rare game where it absolutely enhances the intended experience

Seeing as 96% of visitors to this site do not live in Australia (those are accurate metrics, I just checked), my advice for engaging with this video game is thus as follows: Forget the sports part. This isn't an AFL game, do not play this to learn the minutiae of this country's most popular (and also worst) sport. This is multiplayer chaos that just happens to have a veneer of football scraped over the top as an excuse to be extremely funny, and even as an Aussie Rules hater, I love it for that.