What Sunday Rivals is
Sunday Rivals is arcade American football with the feel of early 90s sports games, built to be picked up quickly and hit hard. On the field the play is snappy: open field jukes, big tackles, simplified rules and streamlined playbooks so anyone can jump in and start playing. It runs as a single game with local multiplayer and Remote Play Together, and it's still in Early Access.
Playing together
Exhibition Mode is the way to sit down with a friend: play against the AI or against each other with a second controller. If you'd rather watch than play, AI vs AI lets you call plays from the sideline or just take in the game. Quick Games strip out penalties and speed up the game clock to keep things moving, and a custom skill level slider lets you tune the balance to suit whoever is on the couch.
Building your own league
Customization goes deep. You pick stadium colors, grass types and endzone text, set coaching strategies, and choose which playbooks teams run — 9 offensive and 5 defensive. Rosters are edited down to individual player ratings and appearance options, right down to what kind of socks a player wears. Leagues can be built from 8, 16, 24 or 32 teams, and each team gets strategy tendencies that fit its roster.
Season Mode and Headhunter
Season Mode puts you in charge of one team for a full year, with sortable player stats, league leaders, weekly awards and custom lineups. You can play, sim or coach any game on the schedule, and custom league and schedule options let you shape the whole year. Headhunter is a separate 4-game single-elimination tournament with fantasy-football-style scoring, 8 extra scoring bonuses, and saved stats you can check against the record books after each game.
Weather and conditions
Dynamic weather and time of day change how the game plays. Rain turns grass to mud, wind pushes kicks wide of the uprights, and fog closes in as day becomes night. Cold weather covers the field in snow, so players trudge through white-out conditions. Worth knowing before you start: the game is tagged as Family Friendly and Singleplayer alongside its local multiplayer, and it's Early Access, so things may still shift.