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Sensible Soccer 2006
Sensible Soccer is one
of those franchises that of late has been somewhere deep in the jungle
with it’s head in the quicksand, competing for shelf space alongside
Fifa and others that have dominated the landscape for some time. SS was
one of the first titles that really had gamers enthused about soccer
whether they were fanatics or not.
Come around to 2006 and the news is out that the new
game is being created by the original designer John Hare. Without the
official blessing of Fifa, the roster does roughly cover the European
league, but with name changes and slight appearance differences like
oversized melon heads!
The title is incredibly easy to get into with a
really small learning time to get the hang of the game. The focus is on
fast gameplay and within about 20 minutes you should have established a
fair degree of control over the ball. There are a number of kicks that
can be performed with varying degrees of difficulty involved in making
them work effectively.
The game itself is fairly solid but does not offer
that much new material to the soccer genre. One of my main bugbears in
the game is that in a rather old fashioned approach, the game determines
which player you can control instead of you selecting them. So
essentially what happened was times where the moves being made didn’t
make sense or the game let you use the best player for a particular
role.
Sensible Soccer does offer multiplayer support with
up to four players duking it out on the field. It’s possible to
effectively negotiate the gaming arena, dribbling the ball along for
glory hounds, however be aware that you had best be sharp or the games
AI will soon sort you out in short order.
Possibly the real letdown with this game is the
absence of any quality audio. There was nothing to get the blood pumping
during a game. Hokey sounds are par for the course and detract from any
fun a “serious” fan of soccer might have who expects that commentary
will be there from known names in the world game.
Best techniques involves a lot of passing of the ball
and curling it with long passes toward goal. Curling can be undertaken
with the sticks and you can really make some insane shots at goal that
challenge belief. At the end of the day what you end up with is a game
that is fun to play, although slightly flawed that doesn’t bring a great
deal of innovation to a sport that already has some brilliant examples
available on this console.
That said, in some ways I actually prefer Sensible
Soccer 2006 for the simple fact that it was easy to pick up and play,
easy to get mates to play and enjoyable for how cheesy the look of the
game was and its efforts to make the players, bobble heads and all, look
like the real life counterparts they were imitating.
Give it a rent for yourself and see what you think. |
