Future sportsball MOBA Steel Circus announced, taking alpha sign-ups
Yes, I know Speedball 2 wasn't even that good
Steel Circus tickles the part of my brain that fills me with nostalgia for Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe, and that's enough to get me interested in it. Just announced and developed by Iron Mountain Interactive, it's a multiplayer 3-on-3 ball-game. Looking more Space Jam than anything, there's robots, knights, weird bagpipe-wielding Scottish stereotypes and some sort of masked businessman all trying to chuck a ball into the other team's goal. The game won't be ready for a while yet, but Iron Mountain are taking sign-ups for alpha testers here. There's a debut teaser below.
While Iron Mountain describe their game as MOBA-like, that seems to refer more to the genre's control layout, applying it to sports, similar to how Battlerite does with arena brawling and Heavy Metal Machines driving... and ball-sports. Each character has their own set of moves - some offensive, some defensive, some supportive, but the ultimate goal is to chuck the ball into the end goal at the far end of the pitch. From the looks of the trailer, the game moves at a fair clip, and shots are fast and snappy, made just a little bit more unpredictable by the pinball bumpers on the pitch.
It's exactly the kind of oddball multiplayer game that I'm sure will never find a niche, but that's what I said about Rocket League (and its predecessor) and look where that is now. Iron Mountain don't have the game quite ready for testing yet, saying that players will be able to try it "in the coming months", but have opened the door for early sign-ups. They're hoping to launch the game with around 20 characters and seven different arenas with multiple layouts each. While not set in stone, they're considering a traditional commercial release, and say there'll be no loot boxes.
There's no firm date on when Steel Circus testing begins, but you can sign up for first dibs on the game on its official page here. You can also find the game on Steam here, where it's to be published by Oasis Games.