Wrestledunk Sports is the new arcade sports game for Switch by Hacknet dev

When you think of what the next game might be by Team Fractal Alligator, the Adelaide studio which created the Hacknet series for PC, a multiplayer-based, arcade sports game probably didn’t come to mind. But alas, that’s exactly what I stumbled upon at AVCon a couple of months ago, and the studio is finally ready to unveil it to the world

Wrestledunk Sports features four contests: wrestling, fencing, volleyball, and smashball (a variation on competitive Pong/Breakout). Each sport can have up to eight players competitively, and even features online play, with the devs boasting “super high performance”.

In the time I spent demoing the game along with fellow Vooks contributor Chris, I had a lot of fun with its zany, brightly-coloured cartoon splendour. Wrestledunk Sports felt great, slick and responsive, which is a requirement for such a competitive game.

Wrestling has you trying to “crunchslam” your opponents by belly-flopping onto them and smushing them. Fencing and volleyball play as you’d expect, whereas smashball suspends players in zero-G and acting as Pong paddles to smash the ball into the opposing’ zone. I spent a majority of my time playing wrestling, given the more action-oriented gameplay and the compulsion for smacktalk. I suspect this will be the most popular mode for many players.

Aesthetically Wrestledunk Sports looks a lot like something from a Cartoon Network series — most notably Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends (if that’s even a thing people remember). The character designs are simplistic rectangles with goofy faces and a range of body/outfit designs to choose from. Cheering audiences, over-reacing commentators and crazy visual effects keep each match ridiculously exciting. It also helps to have 2Mello and Chris Larkin contributing sounds and high energy beats.

Wrestledunk Sports can get pretty crazy with just two players alone; I can’t imagine how bonkers it’s going to be with eight. And it’ll be interesting to see how the game holds up with online multiplayer; it’s lead designer, Matt Trobbiani, is confident the game will perform well since the team put a lot of focus onto its netcode.

And speaking of Trobbiani, it’s exciting to see a radically different game come out of the creator of Hacknet, which comparatively, is a point-and-click/text adventure hybrid wrapped in a hacking sim. 

“Following up from the success that I found in Hacknet, I wanted my games in the future to be much more mechanically rich,” Trobbiani wrote on the new game’s website. “Wrestledunk Sports came from leaning hard into my weaknesses, to make something that was great in all the ways that Hacknet wasn’t. It’s all tightly designed mechanics, all multiplayer, fully supports online play, and all endlessly replayable. It started as an experiment in learning to make games that could better stand on their own without relying on narrative dressing.”

Wrestledunk Sports doesn’t currently have a release date, but is coming to Switch and will be playable at PAX Aus 2019.