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Frozen Endzone's about hand-crafted strategies pieced together in long thoughtful minutes and then unpicked in scrappy, tense seconds; it's about territorial scraps that reward the deep thinker who possesses vision. It's hardly strange that Mode 7's follow-up to Frozen Synapse leans so heavily on the thumping strategy of American football, then - it'd be frankly odd if it turned out to be anything else.After the minimalistic death corridors of Synapse, Endzone's more athletic get-up - complete with primary coloured players and wrapped in gloriously overstated pageantry - can be hard to swallow, at least to anyone like myself who associates the sport of gridiron with thundering hunks of thoughtless meat colliding with one another in a world of obfuscation. Anyone with an education, though, will tell you that American football's a fine and thoughtful sport. Someone like, say, Frozen Endzone's creator Ian Hardingham.
"The thing I love about American football is you have all these great players out on the field but then you have the coaches and the ridiculous preparation that goes into each individual play," he enthuses. "When you have a 45-minute long soccer half you can have all the tactics in the world but a lot of it comes down to reacting. But when each American football play is only something like 10 seconds long, such a large percentage of it is down to exactly where they move their troops to a certain extent."
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