When small-budget indie games come to market based on an existing concept that has been pretty thoroughly explored, it pays to differentiate yourself. In that particular area, I’ll give the developers behind 2048 Boys credit, since moving to a more isometric view of your players does give it a unique look. That said, mere aesthetic differences and a somewhat football-oriented look and feel aren’t enough to sustain an experience, so the expectation of there being a little more going on isn’t unfair.

Without pretty much any introduction at all, you’ll simply be dropped to the field with the instructions to essentially aim and shoot. For anyone who has never played this sort of game before, even if the concept is a simple one, I’m not sure that’s sufficient, especially since the angled perspective simply isn’t quite as clear as the normal top-down look. In particular, it can make banked shots more of a challenge, with the arrow indicator often being pretty useless if you’re looking to make deep shots that need to ricochet at all. The bulky players tend to make for wide targets as well, so making pinpoint shots through a tight space won’t typically work, though you do somewhat get used to the feel for this as you go. The fact that players will sometimes jump at others who have the same number if they’re close enough is nice, but in general whether they’d make their move seemed inconsistent, though perspective may have made that tough to judge.

Where things fall apart a bit, is with the added battery power-up specifically. Bearing in mind that the function of the battery and the football power-ups is never explained, I guess the developers meant for them to be used to help you boost (with the battery) or prune (with the football) specific players to help make your combinations or get some breathing room the further you went. The problem? You can continue to use batteries on the same player repeatedly, often getting a new battery for reaching the next scoring level, and then completely break the game’s scoring in terms of its relevance. It also appears that after you exceed a million the given player resets back to the start, but once you’ve managed to do that so easily it kind of defeats any sense of accomplishment in playing the game at all.