The football simulation UFL shows real gameplay for the first time and looks surprisingly promising. We have all the info on the big new FIFA competitor.
If you’re looking for a really fun football simulation on the PC, it’s really hard at the moment: The FIFA series has been treading water for years and has collected the lowest rating in GlobalESportNews history for its latest spin-off.
FIFA 22 in the PC test: The lowest rating in the series history
And we’d best not even talk about eFootball 2022, the unworthy heir to the once great Pro Evolution Soccer series:
There couldn’t be a better time to present a new football game – and now the developers behind UFL are taking advantage of it. The football hopeful has shown real gameplay for the first time on 27 January 2022, after six years in development, and presented ambitious plans.
Fighting message to FIFA
If you’ve never heard of UFL, the football simulation was first announced at Gamescom 2021’s Opening Night Live. The development studio Strikerz Inc, which was founded specifically for this purpose, has now grown to over 200 employees in the course of development.
“We are gamers! We play a lot – occasionally too much – but one thing remains unchanged: We know what we want to achieve with UFL. We believe the community has been yearning for a change. Our goal with UFL was to create a game that is immune to the issues that we feel are currently blocking the genre’s progress ”
What UFL wants to do better than FIFA: While FIFA is virtually all about the lootbox-plagued Ultimate Team online mode, the UFL developers want to go back to the roots. Their greatest ambition is to convince with good gameplay that is competitive, realistic and responsive.
You can see what it all looks like in action in the first gameplay trailer shown during the presentation:
Neither should you have to worry about scripting or momentum, which has been suspected by gamers in FIFA for years, in UFL, as Strikerz Inc CEO Eugene Nashilov promised. While there will be skill-based matchmaking, there should be no interference in gameplay, he said:
“We’re not trying to change the game to make it work for both players, we’re giving a player the right opponent to compete with and providing them with a learning curve that gives them satisfaction and gratification for mastering another skill level ”
(Eugene Nashilov, CEO of Strikerz Inc.)
Multiplayer in focus
UFL is also to be playable offline or with friends, but the centrepiece is to be the online multiplayer mode UFL Global Online Football League. In this mode you create, manage and build your own football club to compete against other players in a fair matchmaking system based on leagues.
However, there is still no exact information about how the mode will work in detail. So far, we only know that you will have to take care of player transfers and will be able to improve individual players through training. The players who perform best in the ranking games will then be able to participate in official tournaments and win great prizes.
After all: Unlike the competition, you don’t have to start from scratch every year in UFL, the multiplayer is designed as a persistent online world in which your club should be able to grow and flourish over the years.
Crackpoint Licences
It also remains unclear to what extent real players and clubs will be available to you. At the moment it seems that you will only be able to play a very limited number of licensed professionals.
In addition to the brand ambassadors Cristiano Ronaldo, Kevin de Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Roberto Firmino and Oleksandr Zinchenko, the following partner clubs have been confirmed, whose squads and stadiums you will be able to access in the finished game:
- AS Monaco
- Bayer 04 Leverkusen
- Besiktas Istanbul
- Borussia Mönchengladbach
- Celtic Glasgow
- Glasgow Rangers
- Shakhtjor Donetsk
- Sporting Lisbon
- West Ham United
As CEO Nashilov promises, however, many more partnerships are to be formed before the release.
By the way, the release is supposed to take place in 2022, and UFL wants to rely on a F2P model. According to the developers, however, this does not only stand for Free2Play, but also for Fair2Play – there will be no Pay2Win elements in UFL.
