Roman Bowl! Not clay pottery, I'm talking about American Football meets Achilles. Interesting enough concept. I like football, I like roman mythology ... let's take a look.
Roman Bowl is a smaller title that takes five-on-five football and "Romanizes" it. You play from a top-down view of the field, but a side view of the players — better known as an isometric viewpoint — and control your players with the mouse. While the sounds are a bit lacking, they're about par for an independent game. The graphics are very clean and not overdone. It's meant to be a simple game and does a very good job of staying within its scope.
Some of the depth of football has been removed for simplicity. There are no first downs and no punts. You have five downs to score a touchdown or a field goal. There is no real "season" mode, only a playoff mode that increases in difficulty each time you win. But, as a little bit of Roman flavor, field goals are handled by firing a catapult toward the goalposts — of course, there are no defenders here.
Before the snap, you are presented with a choice of three plays that seem to be randomly chosen from a larger playbook. You can see which three plays your opponent has available to choose from, as well. This is the metagame part of Roman Bowl ... as play-calling is fairly simple, it's almost a rock-paper-scissors matchup depending on if you the defense chooses the correct lineup. For instance, a single-back defense is most likely going to lose some ground if the offense is sending two or more receivers downfield to field a pass.
Which is a nice segue into how passing works. You control your quarterback with the mouse, and as you do so, a red arrow extends from your player to the cursor ... he runs in that direction, and when you click, he'll throw the ball. Simple concept, but when you have pass rushers and defensive backs to consider, it's not as easy as you may think. The good news is that there are no interceptions, the bad news is that there are no pass interference penalties.
So, when you play defense, you spend your time controlling a safety, staying between the passer and the receiver, and pushing the receiver out of the way of the ball. And then it's time to tackle. A simple click makes your controlled player attempt to tackle, and your control immediately switches to the nearest defender. If you remember the days of Tecmo Football and the dive/switch/dive/switch/dive defense, you're already a pro.
The field goal attempts are actually very interesting. You have to be across midfield to make an attempt. When you select kick, a large catapult appears on the line of scrimmage, and a stone tower is raised in the end zone. You use three slider bars to adjust your angle, power and bearing and fire a football at the tower. A hit crumbles the tower and counts for 3 points.
There were a few notable downsides ... one being the lack of clock control. Roman Bowl has no timeouts, so if you have the ball and are ahead, you can drain the clock all you'd like. The lack of punting feels very "pee wee football." Failure to score during your five downs places the ball half the distance to the opponent's goal, and they gain possession.
Another, and possibly the largest, downside to the game is the lack of multiplayer. This game would be a blast to play with your friends at work during a break — or anytime you just wanted a 5-10 minute matchup.
To bring this to a close, Roman Bowl is a very well-executed casual football game. It's quick, clean and pretty fun. Downsides are small, and the only glaring detraction from the game is the lack of multiplayer. If you like little football games and want a quick time-killer, go and play the demo. It's downloadable from Garagegames.com.
