4/5 ★ – jdraco's review of Retro Bowl College.

This game makes me sad And not because it’s a bad game and it physically makes me depressed when I play it… But because this is genuinely the only good college football game that’s out right now I mean, you’ve really only got this and then that awful, dogshit, treacherous, worthless, waste of time and programming called EA Sports College Football 25 Which I would rather dunk my balls in hot tar than be forced to play that game again So, again, this game is the only valid option if I want to play a college football game That all being said, though, even if EA Sports College Football 25 wasn’t the fucking black hole of fun and joy that it was, this game would still be a pretty damn good option And that’s mainly because the Retro Bowl formula just works It’s fun, it’s extremely addictive, and most importantly, it’s a damn mobile game, so I can literally just bust out my phone wherever I am and hop on the game Like at home, in the car, in a grocery store bathroom, at my job, at my Uncle Milton’s funeral Again, you can literally play it anywhere And the gameplay is just always so fun, simple, and, again, addictive However, there are some flaws that I’ve noticed with retro bowl gameplay, which aren’t major flaws but are still flaws nonetheless And the first one is that running backs are completely useless Seriously, when you turn the difficulty to extreme, which is what I always play on, you literally cannot run the ball whatsoever Because the other team's defensive players will always be faster than you, and they will always just swarm you immediately, making it so you can only get like 2 yards a carry Now you may be saying that I should just change it to an easier difficulty so that I can run the ball better, which I’d normally agree with you But all the other difficulties in this game are actually just too easy, to the point where they’re not even worth playing because no game is ever really a challenge But with extreme difficulty, it’s usually a challenge every single time, which does lead to much better and more compelling gameplay, despite the annoying fact that I can’t run the ball to save my fucking life Also, another annoying thing about the gameplay is that every single interception in this game is a pick-six And I’m dead fucking serious If you throw an interception in this game, and in the original Retro Bowl as well, there is a 99.9% chance that that ball will be taken back to your own end zone It just happens every single time, because none of your offensive players ever have the speed to be able to catch up to the defender that intercepted the football It is just dumb as hell Regardless, though, the gameplay is still very fun However, I will say where this game specifically lacks in contrast to the original Retro Bowl is with the features and mechanics when it comes to signing and drafting players Because you see, in the original Retro Bowl, at the end of every season, you have the draft, which allows you to sign a multitude of players to your team And you can also resign players or sign players in the middle of the season and all that kind of shit But in this game you can’t do any of that You can’t recruit any player in the middle of the season; you can’t resign any players, which is actually fine because that makes sense for college football But then the “draft,” where you recruit players at the end of your season, is absolutely laughable because your organization has to have the proper amount of “scholarship funds” in order to sign more and more players But I swear to you, you could have fucking 12 billion dollars in scholarship funds, and still at the end of every season, you’ll only be able to recruit 2-3 players Every single fucking time For example, I did one franchise where I was the Buffalo Bulls, and I was absolutely swimming in scholarship funds Because the way you build more and more of them is by having your players go early in the NFL Draft So, again, I was swimming in scholarship funds because all my players were going in the first round or second round So you’d think that with all these scholarship funds, I’d be able to recruit multiple players to come play for my college… Well, if you thought that, you’re a fucking dumbass just like me Because that’s not the case Every single year, no matter if I win the national title, or have multiple players go in the first round, or whatever it may be I always can only recruit 2-3 players, every single time And you can also raise your scholarship funds by spending 100 coaching credits, which are these little tokens that you can pay actual money for or just build up naturally while playing the game But I've never spent them on raising my scholarship funds because 100 coaching credits is a shit ton and takes a while to build up that many, and also I really don’t even know if it will even affect how many players I'm able to recruit Because knowing this game, it probably won’t 2 more little nitpicky things that I want to say about this game, though Is firstly that I wish they had some kind of transfer portal, because that would’ve been more accurate to college football and would’ve been a nice, cool feature to strongly differentiate it from the original Retro Bowl And then my second nitpicky complaint is just that the jerseys suck in this game They are not accurate to real life at all To the point where I actually have to go in and manually change the jerseys for half of these fucking schools because they are so inaccurate Like the Toledo jerseys, for example, which, if you don’t know, Their jerseys all have this dark blue, black, and yellow color scheme to them But in this game, for whatever reason, all of their jerseys are bright purple and yellow Which just makes absolutely no sense And then actually one more small complaint I have is that you can't simulate games for whatever reason Which really doesn’t make any sense because you could do it in the original game, so I don’t know why that feature is lacking from this game It’s just kind of weird to me that they didn’t include it But that all being said, though, this is still a great game And I don’t even want to know how many hours I’ve spent playing it because it is probably a disgustingly high amount But that’s simply because it’s just endlessly addictive Which I’ve said like 20 times already in this review, but that’s because it’s true, and “addictive” really is the best word to describe this game for me So with that being said, I’m going to give this game a 4/5 *Also, I want to note that in the middle of me writing and editing this review, I actually hopped on this game and beat Palo Alto 52-48*