This may be a touch short game review. I often like to exhaust all of you with all the details of the games I play in hopes of providing you with everything you need to know to buy, demo, or forget a game. Unfortunately in this instance, it is a touch difficult as the game, Strategy Soccer, is: A) A sports game and B) A two-player only game. Now typically the first would not be much of an issue, since I, as an American male, spend most of my time emotionally detached from whats going on around me. But the second issue is a bit more of a problem, because as I have previously mentioned the vast majority of my friends choose to manifest themselves exclusively in various digital formats. But we shall overcome these adversities and do the best we can, so get that ice berg sized grain of salt out and lets get to it.
Gameplay
As the game’s name implies, Strategy Soccer has taken upon itself the task of combining both the sports genre and the turn based strategy genre into one package. This of course runs into its first problem right off the bat since any strategy came you try to make requires a great deal of AI work to make even remotely enjoyable for the single player. Strategy Soccer forgoes this need by simply making it a two player only game, which is great to alleviate the heavy burden of programming, but not necessarily great for anyone with a serious lack of willing and able participants.
It was right out of the gate with Strategy Soccer that it began to be a bit bothersome to review. As I had previously mentioned, the game is two player only and my traditionally anti-social personality has lead to it being practically impossible to find people to coerce into playing the game. So this leaves me with the unfathomably boring option of playing the game single player. Imagine if you will, sitting at a chess board and playing yourself because that is exactly what it is.
Moving beyond the lack of a single player mode we do find a few decent design decisions. First and foremost is the decision to go with a turn based system. This alleviates the major issue of sluggishness and the down right inappropriate use of a console controller for a strategy game. Of course on the negative side of things, it also slows down the pace of an already mind bogglingly slow sport. The game also utilizes an energy system that allocates a certain number of points for each players turn. The points are then spent using an assortment of various abilities which have been balanced by what appear to be fairly well thought out energy costs.
Audio/Visual
Graphically speaking, there isn’t a whole lot going on here to talk about. The little sprites are okay, and their jerseys which represent which country the players are from are neat. Unfortunately, at times it was fairly confusing which players were exactly which if they were for example two countries with predominantly red colors.
Music and sound effects are very minimalistic. They work but aren’t worth mentioning beyond me simply saying there was audio.
Summary
I’m sure the game was intended to capitalize on the international extravaganza that is World Cup. Unfortunately I procrastinated and didn’t get this review up till after it was over. Fortunately, that means I probably wont be killing your World Cup buzz by saying that I think you’d best look elsewhere for a soccer fix. This one just feels pretty half baked as is the 240 Microsoft Price.
