Victory Road has garnered rare "overwhelmingly positive" Steam reviews.

2025 was a big year for video games, much like what we experienced in 2024, with Astro Bot, Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, and more all releasing. Clair Obscur: These games, which include Expedition 33, Donkey Kong Bananza, Silent Hill f and Hollow Knight: Silksong, have become huge hits with gamers one after another.

That said, there may be a quiet underdog that trumps all the others, at least when it comes to Steam user reviews, and its name is Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road. Level5's hybrid sports and RPG title currently has a hard-to-find “overwhelmingly positive” status on Steam, with a whopping 96% of the 774 reviews available being “positive.”

Here is a sample of one of our reviews based on people with over 30 hours of history:

I don't like soccer, but this game is still amazing. It's like playing a really good RPG, watching really good animation, following a really interesting story, and competing in a really cool online match system with a really deep and unique team-building mechanic.

This game literally has it all and does it all really well. There is also an amazing gacha system that is completely free. Of course, it's better to look at the price of the game, but still… it's totally worth it.

You don't need to have played Inazuma Eleven before, nor do you need to like this game. Anyway, this is a perfect game.

The rest of the reviews echoed similar sentiments, making Victory Road one of the highest-rated titles of 2025 despite being centered around a franchise that hasn't had a true new entry since at least 2013 and an animated series that's gone almost a decade without new content.

Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road has been years in the making.

Fans of Inazuma Eleven have made this a long-awaited title with titles like Silksong almost a decade since the game was first announced. The game was originally revealed during a 2016 event, at the time announced as Inazuma Eleven Ares along with a matching game to the anime of the same name. It was scheduled to be released in 2018. Keywords: estimation.

After being delayed to 2019, it was completely renamed Inazuma Eleven: Heroes' Great Road and given a 2020 release date. Obviously, that didn't happen and things got pushed back to 2021 before it was finally released in 2023, seven years after it was announced.

The story doesn't end here. There was a final rebranding to Victory Road, next-gen console support was finally added ahead of its 2025 launch, and things were even pushed back one final time before the game's November 13 release. And now, many years later, here is a game that is generating very positive fanfare.