Backbreaker: Vengeance is a sequel to Natural Motion’s 2010 physics based football game. Vengeance takes the tackle alley mode from the first game and expands it to 3 different modes that make up the whole game. Unlike the first game this one doesn’t have a mode for actual football matches. The game keeps the physics based gameplay from the first so there are still tons of interesting and funny tackles and moments in the game.

The first mode in the game is Tackle Alley, which appeared in the first game. In Tackle Alley you must run downfield without being tackled while going through, around and above obstacles. The second mode in the game is called Vengeance. In Vengeance you are the tackler and you must tackle the ball carrier while avoiding obstacles and blockers defending the ball carrier. The last mode and my personal favorite is Supremacy. In Supremacy there are 4 players that compete to get the highest score while rotating whose tackling and whose running. It starts out with the 4 players running through the field and obstacles to get to the end zone and the one with the lowest score is the tackler. At the end of each round the player with the lowest score is the new tackler. My favorite thing to do in this mode is push my opponents out of bounds or try to trip them up while they’re jumping over hurdles.

In Vengeance avoiding tacklers and blockers is the same no matter if you’re carrying the ball or going after the guy carrying the ball. Each opponent is color coded to let you know the best way to get past them. If a guy is yellow then you’d slide under him, if he’s red you jump over him and if he’s blue you’d barge right through him. You can also juke and spin out of their way but that always ends up feeling too easy and doesn’t give as much points as the other options. The obstacles mostly include hurdles you have to jump and out of bound zones which give you only a narrow path to run through while dodging opponents. The game feels like an obstacle course where you have to dodge people trying to take you down and it really works.

In the first game of Tackle Alley you had to go through wave after wave and you could build up lives but if you ran out of those lives you had to start all over. I personally got to wave 99 in Tackle Alley but ran out of lives and had to start over and it was one of the most soul crushing things that’s happened to me in a game. In Vengeance however there are different challenges you unlock as you beat previous ones so if you fail then you can pick up on the challenge you lost and not have to start over. Tackle Alley and Vengeance each have 20 challenges which start to get really difficult around 10. Some of it gets really frustrating because you have a lot of people coming at you and with the third person camera view it’s sometimes hard to see someone coming at you from the sides or behind. While the other modes have 20 challenges Supremacy only has 10 and they seem to go by really fast.

Every mode in Vengeance can be played online with another player. Tackle Alley and Vengeance multiplayer have completely different 2 player maps so that adds more replayability to those modes. In Supremacy multiplayer I don’t remember there being new maps but there could’ve been that I didn’t notice. Even though there are 4 players in a Supremacy match it is still only 2 human players max which was disappointing. I didn’t encounter too much lag online but when there was lag it was unplayable. Every mode is at its most fun when playing with other people, hands down. This is the most fun I’ve had all year in a multiplayer game.

Vengeance is an incredibly fun but sometimes frustrating arcade game that I found to be worth the $15. If you enjoy arcade style football games and don’t mind that it’s missing the actually playing a football game part then this is a definite buy. Whether you’re playing couch multiplayer or online multiplayer this game is a blast with another person.

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