KICKSLAUGHT Review

A Pixel-Art Footballer Who Plays Mostly Without You

KICKSLAUGHT is a solo-developed idle RPG from Turkish studio RedenelGO that casts players as an unnamed street footballer clawing their way up from the lowest league to the top by running, shooting, and leveling gear almost entirely on autopilot. The core loop is closer to an incremental clicker wearing a football skin than a sports sim: your character automatically dribbles across a 2D side-scrolling pitch, launches shots at opposing players who block your path, and finally faces a goalkeeper boss at the end of each stage, with the actual player input limited to managing equipment, spending currency on stat upgrades, and occasionally checking in on progress rather than controlling the action directly. Between matches, players can visit a shop, a training hall, and a phone menu to scout upcoming opponents, all wrapped in a nostalgic pixel-art presentation. It released into Steam Early Access on September 14, 2026 at a budget $0.99, with the developer pushing out two follow-up patches within days of launch.

A Tiny but Perfect Launch Score

KICKSLAUGHT launched to just 18 reviews, but every single one of them is positive, giving it a rare 100% score on Steam — a genuinely small sample, but a completely uncontested one. The pool is heavily international and skews Turkish, reflecting the developer's own background, with a meaningful cluster of Chinese-language reviews and a scattering of Russian and English ones mixed in. What's notable reading through the pool is how little disagreement there is on the fundamentals: virtually nobody disputes what kind of game this is or takes issue with its core hook, and even reviewers who flag real rough edges still recommend it, largely on the strength of its price and its status as a one-person passion project.

An Addictive Second-Screen Loop, Built for Almost Nothing

Reviewers consistently describe KICKSLAUGHT as exactly the kind of low-commitment, background-friendly idle game its design suggests, and several frame that as a genuine selling point rather than a limitation. One reviewer admits they picked it up from a curator page purely because it was about football, went in skeptical, and ended up unexpectedly hooked for close to twenty hours (translated from Russian). Another compares its rhythm directly to the browser dinosaur game that appears when Chrome loses its connection, describing checking in for a couple of minutes at a time between other tasks to manage gear and stats, and suggesting the developer add a proper idle-only mode for exactly that kind of play pattern (translated from Turkish). A third reviewer recommends playing it specifically with music on in the background while scrolling social media or reading the news, checking back every two or three minutes, and reports finishing with a full "legendary" gear set by level 40 (translated from Turkish). Several reviewers single out the fact that this is a one-person project as something worth actively supporting, with one writing, "even though it seems like a simple football game at first glance, as you play it develops its own atmosphere and an addictive sense of progression... especially the fact that a single person's effort is behind this rather than a big studio is something I think deserves extra support" (translated from Turkish). A Chinese-language reviewer sums up the value proposition bluntly after conceding the gameplay itself is thin: "it wins on being cheap — picking it up for the library isn't really a loss" (translated). At under a dollar, that's a low bar to clear, and reviewers broadly agree it clears it.

Thin Tutorialization, Readability Problems, and Not Much Game Underneath

The praise in this pool comes with real, specific caveats, and the most consistent one by far concerns the interface. Multiple Turkish-language reviewers separately flag the game's font and general text legibility as a genuine problem, with one writing plainly that "the font needs to change, a lot of things are very hard to read," and specifically calling out the equipment-upgrade screen as sharing the same issue, on top of an item-synergy system they say is never actually explained anywhere (translated). A near-total absence of onboarding compounds this: a Chinese-language reviewer describes going in "completely lost" with no tutorial explaining how anything works, only piecing the game's basic loop together by reading the store page's own description rather than anything inside the game itself (translated), while a Turkish reviewer separately describes losing their first two matches to the goalkeeper before belatedly discovering that upgrading equipment was the actual key to progressing. Beyond onboarding, several reviewers are candid that there simply isn't much game here once the novelty wears off: one detailed Chinese-language review calls it "not very playable, and after playing for a bit it gets boring," suggesting the developer add a proper idle mini-window mode and an auto-equip feature that swaps in higher-stat gear automatically, since manually managing five equipment slots against an idle-focused design currently works against itself (translated). A couple of shorter reviews add smaller balance complaints, including experience gains that feel too slow relative to the level requirements for new gear, and starting-character health regeneration that one reviewer felt was tuned too generously for how little was actually at stake in the early levels.

Verdict

KICKSLAUGHT is a small, scrappy idle RPG that wears its football theme lightly over what is, underneath, a standard incremental gear-and-level loop — and for the price of a dollar, its entire review pool agrees that's a perfectly fair trade. Its appeal is real but narrow: players looking for a low-effort, check-in-occasionally companion game to run alongside something else will likely find exactly what several of its reviewers describe, while anyone expecting genuine football gameplay, a readable interface, or much depth once the opening hours pass should look elsewhere. Its 100% positive launch score reflects a tiny but genuinely satisfied audience rather than a polished product, and the font legibility issues, thin tutorialization, and requests for basic quality-of-life features like auto-equip suggest a game still very early in its Early Access life. At $0.99, the risk is close to nothing, and the solo-developer story behind it is easy to root for, but this is a curiosity to dabble in rather than a football game to sink real time into.