Had fun playing this solo yesterday and with my sister today!
Absolutely love the concept, utterly unique. Very satisfying as the defense shutting down key opportunities and even more satisfying as the offense when you spot something they missed. The dynamic soundtrack is sublime.
The core puzzling gameplay is smooth and intuitive. The different shaped fields add a nice bit of variance with how you can set up combos, and I dig how it's sometimes worth 'wasting' a turn or two to set up a combo.
The penalties and big plays I'm a bit more mixed on - I think my prime complaint is that they take far too long. Especially when a player tackles a simultaneous penalty and a big play which chains into another big play - it feels like we're waiting around for upwards of a minute and the pacing really takes a hit. I don't think the big play wheel needs the possibility of both being oily and having a mind of its own in the same spin... After a few rounds we were both wishing they could all be a like, 3 second process.
(Tangentially, we also ended up muting the commentator after a bit (sorry...) after hearing the same voice clips again about the offense/defense thinking about their next move etc. (We did like the different voice takes for each menu option readout though!))
The actual random big plays and penalties I think are fine - I think I get the vision of adding in that element of chaos, where players can make risky gambles which may or not pay off. It'd maybe be nice to have a bit more rhyme and reason as to when a big play might actually lead into an interception. And often it feels like taking a penalty to simultaneously match a big play usually compensates for itself. But I think the randomness more or less works for the theme (and I think a bit of random gambling is innate to match-three games anyway. plenty of times I was matching vertically and hoping for good blocks to fall down and chain)
The timing-based mechanic for kicks also has me in two minds. The kicks feel a bit at odds with the puzzle side of the game (which, while there's time pressure involved, doesn't require any reflex timing). But as a gambling 'foo baw' risky play to close out a bad round, well, it works mechanically and thematically and isn't particularly tough if you're close enough to the goal. I like it more than just a random success chance at least.
One bug we seemed to bump into - I fumbled the ball and dropped it into the opponents slot, but then the slot icons seemed to switch around and I kept possession. Not sure what happened there.
Anyway - that's a lot of words, hopefully some of them are useful to you! Genuinely love this and we both came away really digging the game but just wishing some of the cutsceney bits were a bit less intrusive. Very excited to play more of it!