Wild Card Football Review: Gameplay Impressions, Modes, Features and Videos

Wild Card Football from developer Saber Interactive is the rare NFL-inspired video game outside of the Madden NFL sphere.

A pick-up-and-play arcade seven-on-seven experience, Wild Card boasts the NFLPA license, not the NFL license like Madden. So big-name players like Joe Burrow and Patrick Mahomes make the cut, but do so without NFL team branding and stadiums.

Fittingly, Wild Card veers away from simulation-styled football for an all-ages experience that will remind many of the NFL Street and NFL Blitz glory days, while innovating in ways that push it beyond those classics.

Gameplay

An arcade football offering needs to nail down fast-paced action and Wild Card does it about as well as players could ask.

The action is quick on each snap, with passing snappy and running impressively functional and fun, especially compared to how Madden has struggled at times to offer a satisfying rushing option and overall trench play.

Granted, it helps that this is seven-on-seven, but Wild Card makes the most of its big fields. It's easy to put up points on the board like watching a good shootout on television and the hits are massive. Players aren't WWE-style bodyslamming downed opponents after a whistle like games of old, but the actual hits will elicit a few wows from onlookers.

Wild Card is much more than a straight-up barebones arcade football game, though. The big hook is the aptly named Wild Card system, which presents 150 cards for players to strategically deploy.

These cards offer power-ups, stat boosts and/or abilities to players on a per-down basis, providing all range of boosts. Little things like better accuracy on passes to outlandish stuff such as the ball-carrier going invisible or a UFO flying down and getting involved in the action keeps things fresh and often hilarious.

Some cards (Rule Breakers) can even change the rules of the game, such as a defense suddenly restricting the use of passing plays by the offense for a single down (good for say, a third-and-long situation).

The actual implementation is simple, too. Players select a play, then a card at the line of scrimmage. An energy system balances the action. Each card has a different energy requirement and players only replenish two energy after each down.

A very important component of this is that there are no audibles at the line of scrimmage, which keeps things basic for all ages and, more importantly, maintains the importance and focus on the cards.

It all actually feels really fair, at least as much as becoming a giant to rush in for a touchdown on the goal line can, anyway. There is some random frustration when an opponent has a much better card available, but it's all in the game and fair.

Wild Card Football is simply a blast in the pick-up-and-play department and a refreshing change of pace for those non-kids who have spent years in simulation-only purgatory looking for something that feels fresh in the gameplay department.

Graphics and Presentation

Wild Card would flop without the fitting aesthetic and presentation going on here.

It just doesn't take itself too seriously, with cartoonish player models that are just fun and unlike Madden, don't have to strictly adhere to actual body compositions of positions in real life. Named player faces are recognizable with ease, albeit while seeming like bobbleheads. Character attire is generic in the cargo shorts and tank tops over pads sense, but again, fitting.

More important is the game does environmental detail the right way that fits the world perfectly. Something as little as blades of grass and the paint in the end zone is impressive. Gone are the messy, erratic-behaving and looking stadiums of sim games, too.

In their place, fun non-standard football stadium environments with varied, sweeping backgrounds. It might remind some players of the robust offering of stages found in fighting games. There are jungles with depth, a tropical paradise, urban environments and quite a bit more with fun things going on in the background.

Ditto for team options. Want to be the Eagles? Like literal eagles? There's a well-animated, feathery suit for that, complete with a beak on the helmet and taloned gloves.

Wild Card Football actually does some really interesting camera angles and presentation decisions. Kickoffs, for example, are booming up in the air, giving players a really cool view of the creative stadiums.

The sound design is on point too. There are no concerns about commentators repeating the same lines found in recent years, with just some player banter mixed into the music and big menu sound effects every now and then. Everything is more impactful, from the punch against the pads of a player fielding a kickoff to the collisions that sound like wrecks.

Superstar, Franchise and More

Much of Wild Card Football's gameplay loop takes place in Dream Squad, where players can tackle a league mode with ranked leaderboards through divisions or a tour mode while taking on challenges against the CPU.

The game is accommodating to however players want to play it. Those competitive ladders boast crossplay and the solo challenges are often fun and rewarding.

Wild Card, Football thankfully, gets customization all the way right, too, be it formulating a deck, team or fashion. A player's custom team gets assembled through player cards of four different rarities (common, rare, epic and legendary) and put into a deck.

Of note, players need to level up their cards as they go, but it feels fair. And a specific NFLer's card only comes with one rarity no matter what, so there's no concern about this system going overboard like the Ultimate Team route.

The process of building playbooks and decks is deeper than one might expect given the casual-feeling look of the game. Games might still come down to RNG on the field itself given which cards actually pop up when and how, but having some control over it is a nice touch.

Players can also customize teams and outfits to an excessive degree, including logos and other cosmetics unlocked through gameplay.

Wild Card Football promises no microtransactions and fitting with this theme, players can trade in duplicates found from card packs for currency used to buy other cards.

Outside of Dream Squad, the game offers a Season mode and offline weekly tournament, as well as a solid list of settings. The game runs well too, as expected, making for fluid action without much in the way of hiccups.

Conclusion

It's nice to see some innovation in an area so monopolized and mundane at times. When many players hear about cards in a football game, the reactions aren't positive.

Yet here is Wild Card Football, throwing out an almost Mario Kart-styled football with some serious heart. The combination of cards, decks and the most popular sport stateside is a ton of fun pretty much right from the first time a player picks it up.

A refreshing example of the new things sports games can offer, Wild Card Football should have some seriously long legs thanks to post-launch content plans.

Even without those, though, there's undoubtedly going to be a solid community that pops up around it, as tends to happen for games that have that it (fun) factor.