You know #IDARB has got you the first time you start yelling at the TV when you’re playing it. It’s one of those games that slips under the radar while looking completely innocuous and ambushes you. I love it for that.

I admit to being completely confused when I first watched #IDARB in action. It’s fast, colourful, a bit frenetic and quite chaotic. Stick with it though and you will see the clever design behind that chaos.

#IDARB is a competitive Xbox One game played with two teams of four. It’s a two-dimensional sports game that is a mix of jetpacks, platforming, basketball and lots of other sports games. It’s a purposeful mishmash that is part crowdsourced and part designed.

#IDARB looks simple with Minecraft-like 8-bit visuals – yet it’s that simplicity that makes it so compelling. The idea is to get the red ball in the opponent’s net. You can combine combos for more points, use rebounds, jetpacks and any trick you can get away with. The fancier the combo, the more points you score.

While the premise is simple, play is not. It’s fast, needs lot of practice and coordinating four players is harder than in many other games. Yet it’s also much more fun that other games of this type.

As well as good gameplay, #IDARB also encourages good communication between players. You have to tell your teammates where you are, what you’re doing and what your intentions are. Then you all have to coordinate to pull off a score.

#IDARB proves that you don’t need to spend millions to design a great game and that gaming isn’t about graphics, celebrity voiceovers and branding – it’s about the game and it doesn’t get better than this.

Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.