The world is your obstacle in Kick, a sunny side-scrolling soccer platformer from nospacelost and Shoreline Games.
Kick. Credit: nospacelost / Shoreline Games
Kick is a side-scrolling soccer platformer from solo developer nospacelost, published by Shoreline Games. It’s a sunny, nostalgic game about play and carefree days. You’re a kid in rural Japan walking to school, and you want to make it all the way there with your soccer ball. The world is your obstacle.
You run, jump, and kick your way through over 20 levels with varying goals. Sometimes you need to get from point A to point B; other times, you need to race to the finish with your ball. It brings back fond memories of the silly challenges you might give yourself as a kid. In one level, you have to race to the goal with your ball before a plane flying overhead reaches it. In real life, there’s no loser here except in your own mind. But when you’re a kid, that matters. The game presents plenty of even sillier situations that brought a smile to my face.
You can kick the ball, dribble it, slide into it, do a header, or even pull off a flying backward kick. Timing and positioning are important. Hitting things with the ball—pedestrians, cats, stacked crates—results in a foul. Too many fouls, and you have to restart the level. Threading the ball through a tight spot to collect a more valuable coin without knocking something over, especially at speed, feels great.
Kick. Credit: nospacelost / Shoreline Games
Kick. Credit: nospacelost / Shoreline Games
Sometimes, though, the ball’s movement feels unpredictable. A bad touch or weird bounce can ruin an otherwise good run through a level. For a cozy game, I spent far more time on edge than I’d like. It could also just be that I’m bad at it.
Kick is a 2.5D side-scroller featuring 2D characters in a 3D world. It’s a nice effect; the beautifully animated, hand-drawn characters and cel-shaded backgrounds make the game look like a breezy anime. The scenery combines flat, bright colors with some nice textures, backed by a painterly blue sky with fluffy white clouds. Anime-style dust clouds and manga-style exclamations in Japanese help make the world feel alive.
Kick is a small, charming game with a sweet premise and lovely art. It’s hard for me to tell whether my trouble with the ball control comes from a flaw in the game or just a skill issue; maybe you’ll be better at it than I am. With its $4.99 price tag on Steam, I’d say it’s worth playing to find out.
Kick
Kick captures the joy of making up silly challenges as a kid, though its ball handling sometimes left me more tense than I’d like. Could also be I’m not good at it.
The world is your obstacle in Kick, a sunny side-scrolling soccer platformer from nospacelost and Shoreline Games.