The indie footballer Legend Bowl developer, Super Pixel Games, launched its latest free content update April 7. Legend Bowl has added Franchise Mode via the update and a suite of quality improvements.
Legend Bowl Franchise Update
Franchise Mode allows players to manage custom teams for many seasons. Players can manage rosters, with an emphasis on team chemistry. The mode features player personalities that impact the health and morale of teams. Such personality traits are “cornerstones to how you build your team,” notes Javier Martinez, lead and sole developer on the pixel-based football simulator.
Team Chemistry
Legend Bowl cleverly measures and depicts player emotion through emojis and creative expressive smiley faces (or not so smiley). The emojis allow players to gauge their team morale in the roster viewing menus.
Your pixel footballer skill will be impacted by player personality, traits, and moods. Comparatively, Konami’s power pro baseball games use smiley faces that update in real-time during the game depending on player performance. A veteran sports gamer, Martinez tactfully adds similar elements to Legend Bowl.
Whereas AAA titles weave morale into franchise modes in games, Legend Bowl makes player morale the engine driving Franchise Mode. The dev designed franchise Mode to simplify running a franchise. LB boils down the most important aspects of managing a franchise into its decision-making menus. The game orients around star players, a complete seven-round draft, player progression, and free agency. Backups? They are replaceable, so the dev places less emphasis on them.
Legend Bowl Franchise Mode Engine
The Franchise Mode engine is driven by team salary and team chemistry. Instead of a salary cap, the game features a salary ranking system, with teams actively working toward balancing their budget to the league mean. The system promotes player movement and action. Teams cut or sign players, actively working to improve team morale and lower salaries. Player wire events, otherwise known as free agency events, are driven by team chemistry. During seasons, opportunities will pop up to sign players or release players impacting team makeup.
Added Value
The Franchise Mode update elevates LB to levels sim-heads, and dedicated football fans will deeply appreciate it. The customization LB offers lend layers of depth and replay value.
Franchise Mode features a Hall of Fame menu that tracks all the awards for players across the league. Players can admire their highly coveted pixel trophies in the trophy room. Trophies come in silver and gold for various awards and are absolute gems of the game.
The update will feature jersey improvements. Numbers are now featured in the game on jerseys on the field, and LB added stitch-on patches for different events such as the Legend Bowl or breast cancer awareness month. The details are cute, and the pixel footballers deliver notes of Nintendo Wii Mii characters. Except these players can ball.
Perhaps an NFT gold mine, the pixel art and digital artifacts in Legend Bowl continue to impress.
The community has built a list of one hundred milestones that Martinez has added to the Franchise Mode update for players to unlock. Milestones earned will launch popups in-game with an audible cue, signifying a player’s achievement.
Legend Bowl is currently available on Steam, and a port is expected for Nintendo Switch in 2022, although Super Pixel Games has yet to confirm a release date.
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