In a Wooden Spooners exclusive, we can reveal the NRL’s plans for an exciting free-to-play mobile game for Android and Apple platforms. No, not even Fox League have made a clickbait article about it yet.
Called NRL Village, players will take control of their favourite NRL side, though it won’t be your typical arcade or sports management game.
In the tradition of every rip-off worldbuilding game since Sim City, players will start with a squad of 10, and then be forced to do mundane timed tasks (like attending training, going to boring “awareness” seminars, running a school clinic) to unlock the full 30-man squad. As this is a family-friendly game, there will be no sex/drugs/hiding from police/linked-with-bikie-gangs controversies for players to deal with.
Like some worldbuilding games, these unlockable tasks will start off easy then get harder and harder (though an in-game currency system can be used to speed up progress), forcing players to shell out actual money to make any progress. Those tight-arses who refuse to pay extra money will need to superhuman patience for their team to be unlocked.
Once the team is unlocked, they can enter the NRL season proper. However, it won’t be the usual arcade-style of previous NRL games. Instead, games will be decided by a PVP Match Three puzzle, with difficulty graded based on your squad’s strength, your form, and the opposition, ranging from super easy to unfairly hard. Players will earn extra coins for winning a game.
Like most “freemium” games, NRL Village has no end, meaning players can control their favourite team for as many seasons as they want, regardless of how many premierships they win. Players can also buy and sell players (using their in-game currency) at any point during the seasons, or purge their rosters at the end of the season.
The Wooden Spooners tried to contact a developer at MoneyGrubber Studios, but they were too busy trying to win a premiership with the Wests Tigers and said they were going to busy for a while.
