Touchdowners 2 – Mad Football Review

With the big game coming up in a week and a half we thought it would be cool to check out one of the football games on the app store. We already love Retro Bowl and if you are looking for a quick tip on that one check out our article on the bullet pass. For this review we thought we would look at a different football game – Touchdowners 2.

Touchdowners 2 is a football mini game from Miniclip. Miniclip is behind several popular titles on the app store such as 8 Ball Pool and Subway Surfers. They have been around for quite a while, since 2001, and have obviously grown a lot. Their apps have over 7 billion downloads. So, quite a lot of success for them.

Gameplay

Touchdowners 2 is a mini game that you can play online against other players. Each team has three players and just like real football you are trying to score more points than the opponent by scoring touchdowns and kicking field goals. Unlike real football there are no first downs or penalties. Mostly there is a lot of mayhem.

One team kicks off to the other and then you do everything you can to get to the end zone. Apparently, there is also a way to kick a field goal from the kick off but I haven’t actually figured out how to do it. I have struck the ball perfectly many times at many different angles and it has never gone through the up-rites so there must be some trick. If anyone knows what that trick is and wants to pass it along in the comments I would be eternally grateful. You can pass to players ahead of you and you can run and jump over the opponent but a lot of the time you kind of end up aimlessly flailing around trying to figure out who has the ball and if you are running the right way.

This is my biggest gripe with Touchdowners 2, it is just too confusing. It is often not clear who has the ball. When you get hit by the other player you sometimes fumble the ball – sometimes not. When you do fumble the ball it generally flies up in the air so you can see it and go after it. However, sometimes when you get hit you helmet flies off, which also flies in the air and happens to look an awful lot like the ball. In these quick moments you don’t know if the ball was fumbled or not and by the time you have figured it out you are either running the wrong way or the other team has scored. Super annoying. Aside from that the game is pretty fun it is just very short. There is really only one game mode which is the 1 v 1 and that doesn’t offer a whole lot of game-play variability. There is also a daily field goal challenge for a reward depending on where you place the ball but this is just a once a day thing. You can play it again for dollars but you do have to spend real money.

Economy

There is a game economy with the typical two currency layout. You get coins, which you use to play games. It is basically like a casino system each player puts up a number of coins to play and then the winner takes home the pot. I think that is kind of a neat innovation on the normal pay to play in games like Mr. Autofire or Survivor.io. The coins can also be used to upgrade your character or to get cosmetics. Then there are dollars which can be used to open card packs that give you new players etc. The new players have better stats and of course when you upgrade a character you also get better stats for that player. It is not really clear to me though how these stats actually help you. The players themselves don’t appear to play any better and I can’t say I have won a bunch more games or anything after upgrading a player.

Conclusion

I feel like there is a nugget of something good with this game it just isn’t quite fully realized. The core game-play is a lot of fun. I like the mayhem of running around trying to score and plowing into the other team along the way. It just needs a couple of tweaks that I think would help it out a lot. First, change it so the helmets don’t fly off and look like the ball. Second make it a bit more obvious how to score field goals. Third either make the upgrades of the players more powerful or maybe just get rid of them all together because if they are too powerful it starts to feel like pay to play. Anyway, for right now this one isn’t going to stay on the home screen. Although, I will add that I may come back and check in a bit to see if there have been any updates and then reevaluate.