First Looks// Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival

Twenty six years is an agonisingly long time in video games, so to see a game that has effectively been given a reboot (no pun intended) in the form of Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival, with all the old tropes attached to it, I had to wonder. Does the world need another remake of a game that is older than most people playing it? Well based on my time with it the answer is 'possibly'.

Presently in very much pre-alpha form, Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival was present at Rezzed 2016 in a playable state, even if only one half of a match could be played. As I picked up the DualShock 4 I was shocked to discover (sorry, I really am) that Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival bases its control scheme on a one thumb stick and one button configuration.

That's right, the 13 other buttons on the PS4's controller are all ignored. With the exception of the Share button of course, for showing off how utterly inept you are at playing Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival. For I was very much inept as I began playing.

The beauty of Kick Off 2 and this spiritual follow up title, Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival is the nuance of how the player interacts with the ball using the simple one button/thumb stick control scheme that comes from its heyday.

In order to keep the ball in front of the team member on the pitch, the player must press the button before they make contact with it, or else it will simply roll off into some other direction. This happened to me repeatedly when I initially began playing Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival but I quickly figured it out, only to be confronted with more complexity in the form of knowing how hard I needed to press the thumb stick in a particular direction before letting the ball fly off.

To reduce the control scheme to such a rudimentary state does initially come across as counter-intuitive and I did balk against it at first, but once you get used to it, you realise why it's there. It places a significant amount of emphasis of skill on the part of the player as they have to master a very complex control scheme in order to be proficient in Dino Dini's Kick

Off Revival. This is akin to beat-'em-ups like Street Fighter V that demand players understand layer upon layer of control schemes in order to be victorious.

Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival is presented in a similar way to the original, with 2D top down scrolling view and radar of players of on the top left hand corner. The place holder sound effects that were present in the build I played were taken from the Atari ST original. There is some debate as to whether or not they will remain.

Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival is due to appear sometime in 2016 on the PS4 and PS Vita.