Sports Gaming News Weekly Wrap-Up (Feb 21 - Feb 27, 2021)

In this video, Prince takes a look at the latest information drop for eSports Boxing Club. As of the posting of this video, Steel City has announced Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, and Jack Johnson as legends.

Brian recently had a chance to chat with Steel City Interactive’s studio head, Ash Habib, about eSports Boxing Club. You can hear his more in-depth thoughts in our most recent video.

What I want to see is the ability to create sponsorship advertisements and logos in-game and apply them to both MLB and MiLB stadiums. I want to see a Coke bottle on one of the advertisement plaques that sits adjacent to the scoreboard in Coors Field, or let me create a Budweiser logo to sit above the scoreboard in Busch Stadium.

Right away, viewers should notice the design team’s choice to once again follow the Topps card art style. It’s not exactly the same as the Topps Series 1 set from this year, but it has some similar characteristics. Time will tell if it’s tinkered with before launch. It’s a crispy design with an old school banner layover featuring the player’s name and minimalist flair. San Diego Studio and Topps have partnered on card art for a few years now, and that trend appears to be continuing this year.

Konami’s decision to make eFootball PES 2021 a “Season Update” was a risky one. With both Sony and Microsoft rolling out new consoles, Konami rolled the dice and gave the “make the sports development cycle two years” gamble. Utilizing two years of development time while building off the surprisingly solid and improved gameplay of PES 2021 has put a lot of pressure on Konami to deliver a vastly improved overall footy experience for PES 2022. It’s with this in mind that I’ll detail five areas that must see improvement in this PES 2022 wishlist.

In short, Slapshot Rebound is described as a physics-based multiplayer game where you play an arcade-style match of ice hockey. In Slapshot Rebound, there are no shot buttons, no invisible puck glue magic, and no random number generator (RNG) nonsense. It’s up to you and your team to take control of the puck and try to out pass, shoot, and outplay your opponents. Additionally, In Slapshot Rebound, you have the ability to play with your friends or team up with other Slapshot Rebound community players.

I don’t think many folks were necessarily clamoring for a dodgeball video game in 2021, so expectations were low when EA and Velan Studios opened the closed beta version of Knockout City on Steam. This probably played to the game’s advantage though because now my first impressions of Knockout City are that it’s a fresh and frenetic twist on a cross-platform shooter. It has a lot of potential to tweak the existing framework and implement new elements that could continue to keep the gameplay from getting too stale.

The point is, there isn’t much to keep the virtual wrestling marks at bay. We have been hoping that would change when Kenny Omega and The Elite arrived, and it very well might, but many questions remain. With that in mind, and with the release of AEW Casino: Double or Nothing for mobile, it’s time to get a pulse here for what else is happening in AEW land.

Wolverine Studios has done a solid job of positioning itself near the top of the simulation scene for a couple years now. Some of the studio’s offerings have helped fill the void where sports titles do not exist due to licensing or legality issues. This is no more true than with the Draft Day Sports: College Basketball franchise, and so that’s why it has been nice to play the Early Access 2021 version for review as of late.