Originally released in 1990,Speedball 2 HD is a high res version of it, with a few new bells and whistles. But what exactly is "Speedball"? Well, in the future cyborg street gangs make a brutal sport in order to gain territories, that sport is called "Speedball". Speedball 2 and far as i understand takes place after the fact where the sport is more popular and is played for the entertainment of the crowd. Though this whole story i had to read up on since the game itself does not over much in the way of story. Before writing about the game play since it would be the longest part of this review, a bit about the port. It is a good port. Sprites are now no longer pixels, sound and music (what little there is) has been updated to sound excellent on the modern machines. There is also nice touches like rebindable controls and the ability to make a local tournament with custom rules. I was genuinely surprised by who much i like this port.

 

Ok now on to the real meat of Speedball 2- the rules and gameplay. The game is basically a mix of handball and hockey. You control a player chasing an iron ball around, when the ball is not in your possession all you can do is tackle and beat up other players, but when you have the ball all you can do is toss the ball and avoid being tackled. Your controls are 4 directional movement buttons and an action button. The action button (by default "Enter") does everything: passing, shooting, tackling and so on. The rules are as such: Scoring on the goal grants you 10 points, in the level there spread out things like bumpers, team specific star targets, holes that teleport the ball from one side of the map to the other and few more things, which doing them gives you 2 points each. And to top it all off during games there are random drops that can be stat upgrades for the character that picks it up and random global effects items, like "All enemy players trip" or "Every one on your team has a shield" to name a few. Score the most you can in 3 minute games (including half time). And that's about it. The games a short and actually sort of fun. To continue with the good wave i have here, let me tell you about the management part of the game. Now while i am not the biggest fan of sport management games, but the management portion of the game is simple. You can switch the position of you character, the random scouting can yield straight up better players in every way to one of yours and you can train them to be faster, stronger, better. Well no, technically they are all cyborgs so you are not training them, rather you are buying them new parts. Overall simple and enjoyable management system.

 

But of course there are some pretty bad design things that could ruin the game for some people. For starters, there is no reliable way to change the player you are controlling, usually it will automatically switch to either the person carrying the ball or the one closes to it. How ever that does not apply if your player is on the screen. Meaning that there are moments where you chase the ball even though you have another player right next to it. Also it gets very hectic when there are a group of tackling each other. Not only that, while the camera is only focus on the ball, the pick ups and other such stuff keeps spawning of screen, so there will be frustrating when an enemy player gets the "Enemy Team Is Frozen" power up and have an easy score. Also on the higher difficulties, the enemy team can beat the hell out of your team off screen resulting in that you cant change the player since they are all rolling on the ground in pain. Again, frustrating and kind of unfair.

 

But overall, Speedball 2 HD is a good time waster. At first i thought it could be just a nostalgia bait game to make a quick buck, but after a few hours i find myself saying "I could waste a few minutes/hours with this from time to time." Also i am guessing that it might have some nostalgic power behind it. If you want a wacky sport game, fast yet not as violent as say "Blood Ball" or "Mutant League", than this is for you.