eFootball Kick Off!

Konami, the company that took Pro Evolution Soccer, the most beloved football series of the 2000s, and slowly waterboarded it into a free-to-play menu simulator called eFootball, is back. And this time they brought the family name to Nintendo's house. eFootball Kick Off! is a twenty dollar digital-only Switch 2 exclusive, and against every instinct I have honed over a decade of watching this publisher monetize its own legacy, it is actually good. Not great. Good. The kind of good that makes you angry, because it proves Konami knew how to do this all along and simply chose not to. Tight controls, smooth animation, sixty frames per second on a handheld, all the things eFootball proper has fumbled for years just casually show up here like nothing ever happened.

On the pitch, this is the best Konami football has felt since the PS2 gathered dust. Passing has weight, defending is readable, and the whole thing hums along at sixty frames per second while EA Sports FC wheezes at thirty on the very same console. International Cup lets you take a national team through a tournament, and World Tour, the real centerpiece, has you founding your own club and dragging it across the planet, an actual single-player mode with actual substance in the year 2026. There are no card packs, no rarity tiers, no glowing currency icons begging in the corner of the screen. You pay twenty dollars once and you own a football game. Revolutionary stuff, apparently. The bar is on the floor and Konami still deserves credit for stepping over it with style.

Now the asterisks. It is digital-only, so your purchase lives and dies with a storefront. The licensing is a patchwork quilt, real legends and national kits stitched next to gaps Konami politely asks you not to notice. And the depth is honest arcade depth, which means after a few weeks the systems underneath start showing their elbows; this is a game to enjoy, not to inhabit. The Messi early-purchase bonus is also a small tell that the FOMO department survived the layoffs. But here is the bright side, and it is genuinely bright: sixty frames, twenty dollars, zero microtransactions, and a single-player mode with a pulse. Konami went back to Nintendo hardware, swallowed its pride, and shipped fun. If this is them trying football again, let them keep trying.