"One of the worst games I have ever played."

Let me get two things straight before we start. One; I tend to over like and over rate games. Look at my other reviews – they are all pretty much high scores. Two; I love football. To bits. I regard it as the finest sports in the world. Why did I just point these out, you may be thinking? To show that I am not rating this game because I hate every game that ever existed and also that I don’t hate football as its ‘slow and boring’ or some other lame excuse.

You start up the game and after the logos of the developers and so on, you are presented with the Game Setup screen. There are loads of options to choose from; the language, game type, teams, fouls, game type, weather, field… etc. Lots of things for football fans. At the time, I thought this was looking good, despite the horrid music playing in the back ground. After choosing my options, (I wanted a quick exhibition to start with) I press start and I choose the team I want to be out of the two I just picked.

Stats appear of the two teams, with an American style commentary underneath, by some nobody named Bill Brown (catchy) from EA sports. It tells me what the teams are like. Okay. Onward. Now is some more options, such as Control Setup, Team Coverage, Team Strategy, Formation and starting line up. The range of options here are impressive, and I was looking forward to my match. I selected ‘Start Game’, and the horror begins.

I select a coin side (which shouldn’t happen in football) and kick off starts. The ball is passed between the computer, and all the players are flickering between animations. It reminds me of those old LCD games with the animation like this. This is clearly not good, and puts me off a whole lot - but I guess I could carry on. After a few minutes play, I noticed two errors of the biggest kind. The first were the controls. A is what looks like pass, shoot, overhead kick, tackle and break dance all rolled into one. B is change player. So I just ran round mashing the A button with some hope of getting the ball, and changing player every few seconds, which it should automatically do anyway. This all meant doing what moves and my playing style I wanted to do went down the drain.

The second fault, which is by FAR the biggest down side of the game, is that the players cannot run with the ball properly. Or should I say, at all. After some how getting the ball, I decide to run on a little down the pitch, and it left the ball behind. Eh? So you have to keep in line with the ball and run so it doesn’t slip from your path, which is very hard to do. Noticing this, I decide to just kick it when I got it straight away to the nearest player. So I press A, and it smashes it about 500 yards in the direction of the goal. You try and adjust, and with the CPU team on your tail trying to gain the ball back, it’s hopeless. I played the match, switched it off and left it. I came back to it again, and had another bash with the same problems arising.

I mash A madly to get the ball, so my players are diving and sliding to no where, and they are kicking thin air. When the ball is free with no one on it, I run to it and press A for a simple kick. So the player SLIDE TACKLES and misses it completely. The ball also acts like someone is holding and running about with it; it floats in mid air half the time, and seems to spoon like crazy. This seriously isn’t cricket. It isn’t even football.

With so many faults, I found it hard to find anything I like about it. It is just so shabby and unplayable it’s untrue. I wouldn’t touch this even for a bet, because you will probably end up with brain damage or something by smashing the GameBoy over your head in frustration. All in all, a very VERY terrible game and is a disgrace to the beautiful game, that is football.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 08/28/03