I’ve never been a football person, so this whole Global Mug thing that’s going on at the moment is as important to me as eyelids for a fish. What I have always been is someone who likes platformers, however, even when they’re all about that thing they call the beautiful game. And in the case of Kick, it seems that sidescrolling ball dribbling is actually quite delightful.

In Kick, you play as your average teenage boy who’s on his way to school, a football in front of him at all times. As this boy you have a few options at your disposal. You can gently guide it was you lightly job, you can lob it into the air at a low altitude, fully pelt it up above you, do a sick windmill kick or a sliding kick, and you can jump. Wouldn’t be a platformer without jumping, now would it?

Kick is then divided up into levels, with a variety of challenges on display. One might see you simply trying to get to the end, avoiding all manner of barriers in the way. These barriers might be signs, delivery drivers carrying boxes, teen girls holding umbrellas, the usual kind of thing, and knocking into them can leave you with a foul and a yellow card. Get enough yellow cards, and you get a red card, punting you to the beginning of the level. And so it becomes a dance of kicking the ball at just the right times, all while navigating these spaces yourself, having to be careful to make sure both slot in just right to the landscapes’ trials and tribulations. It’s a pretty dance too, everything’s light and bright and colourful, with some animations that tickled me too.

None of this as easy as I describe it though. It’s tricky to get the timing right on kicking the ball in just the right way, especially as there’s also coins to pick up along the way that let you buy different kinds of footballs to take with you on your journey. I like the challenge though, there’s a satisfaction in trying to gain control over an object that is slightly at the whims of its environment once it’s away from your boot. Huh, that’s probably what actual football is kind of like, ‘ey? I’ll stick to video games still, I think.

Kick doesn’t have an exact release date just yet, but it is slated for release in November. You can wishlist it on Steam, and try out its demo, right here.