Hearken back to the days or yore...or at least the late 70’s with Super Shock Football, from developer Steamroller Studios and publisher Chillingo. The game lets you take control of your randomly moving American football team and try to crush your opponents. Or at least randomly run into them to make them stop.

Warning! This game is extremely intensive for the iPhone and it will drain your battery quickly as well. If you need your phone for the day and have no way to charge it, this is not a game to play then. Also, you’ll probably need to restart your iPhone before you play just to clear up some memory and resources.

However, Super Shock Football is awesome. It’s built in Unity which gives it a full 3D capability which is pretty cool. You can watch the game either from a top down view or you can get a 3D side view. To help you out with the processor issues they have given you the ability to change the number of players on each side as well as the duration of the game.

Prior to each play you can choose a strategy and move your men around on the field. Once that’s done it’s hands-off fun as they somewhat randomly move around the field. There’s passing of course, this is American football, which is easy enough. Touch your quarterback to begin the passing  phase and drag your finger to where you want to throw. It’s quite easy really.

But just because your receiver caught the ball doesn’t mean you’ll make ground as he could, at any moment, turn in the opposite diretion. Here’s where a great piece of the game comes in. Whatever your furthest forward progress is on any play limits your possible backwards motion. So if you make it to the 20-yard line and suddenly turn around you’ll only lose about 10 yards.

Super Shock Football is so cool in fact, that I was actually doing a mini touchdown dance, shouting "Go! Go! Go!" and "No! No! The other way!" at the iPhone which had people around me thinking I had lost my mind. Sure there’s not a lot to the gameplay, but then again there wasn’t much to the original and I played that every week for months when I was a child.

The game gives you both single and two-player action as well as a quick start option which just means you don’t need to worry about choosing a team, etc. It also keeps stats on your matches and uses the OpenFeint system for online tracking and achievements.

What Super Shock Football is missing is a career or season mode so you have something more than a single game at a time. I’d also like to see a second version of the game with specialty players that might have some stat which affects how they play. For example a bigger heavier guy to anchor your front line or a more forward leaning player for faster wide receiving. But of course these are just my ideas and they don’t detract from the game at hand aside from the lack of a season/career mode.

Note: If you install the game and it doesn’t work right away, generally it will crash when you try to begin a game, you will need to restart your iPhone and then try the game straight away so that other things aren’t running as well.