I’ve Seen the Future of Sports Hry and It’s Called ‘Just Volleyball

We, sports!

Earlier this year, I set out on a journey I’m confident will change me for good once it’s over: I began watching Haikyu!!. It’s my first sports anime (when you’re a chubby little muffin like I was, you care more about Not Moving than Sports), a genre I’d only ever dipped my toes into and am now making up for after all these years. And it’s good eatin’. I even, very briefly, considered taking up volleyball. Yet now I don’t have to, and it’s all thanks to a delightful, incredibly Wii Sports-flavoured game called just volleyball.

just volleyball [sic] is a sports game that is exactly what it says on the tin. In its demo, you’re immediately greeted by an avatar customisation screen not too dissimilar to the Mii Channel of Wii days gone by. There are plenty of hair options, some charmingly wonky face designs, you can set how your voice sounds, choose the number on your jersey—it’s all good stuff. And then comes the volleyball.

As in real volleyball, you can jump, bump, dive, spike, block and serve. Unlike Wii Sports, however, you have to be a lot more on the ball than simply having a controller nearby. I played using a controller, and the controls work like this: you move your funny lil guy around with the left stick, and with the right stick you aim where you want to hit the ball. That might be across the net to your opponents’ side of the field, or it could be towards one of your teammates. None of it is as easy as it sounds.

You have to stay constantly alert to where the ball might land, and if you’re the one receiving it, you need to make sure you’re pointing your cursor towards a teammate, as it’s more than unlikely you’ll score yourself a point that way. Serving is finicky too, requiring precise timing and tight skills so as to fool the opposing players. I never quite got the hang of it, but I at least made some headway with the other components.

Mostly what I feel towards just volleyball is delight. There’s hardly any frills to it, it’s clearly inspired by Wii Sports yet isn’t trying to be Wii Sports, just its own thing. Just, volleyball! If you’re interested in giving it a go yourself, then you can try out the demo on Steam ahead of its release on November 4th.