Soccer Story – A Disappointing Kick in the Wrong Direction

By Nick Bruno

KABOOM – Without warning there’s an earth shattering explosion during the biggest Soccer game of the year, The Apple Cup. A plot by the evil Soccer Inc unfolds to take over the world by banning the game of Soccer globally – It’s too dangerous to allow anyone to play again! How did it work? We don’t know! But now Soccertown and the rest of the world, through the presence of referees turned anti soccer enforcers are doomed to never play the sport again.

What’s that? There’s a workaround when a magic ball is sent to our prophesied-to-the-town-mayor-by-mysterious-robots hero Leo, who sets course to play Soccer “Goalball” (to not anger Soccer Inc) once more. To do that he must first complete a series of  slightly annoying fetch quests to prove himself worthy to his newfound team members. Get ready to pick up trash cans, slide through “No Soccer” signs, and timed footrace all while traveling back and forth to the same places in the little town square again and again.

What Soccer Story does good, it does really good and that’s the dialogue. The demo is full of sharp one liners and witty banter that got more than a couple real laughs out of me. Your first Goalball match is against a team of toddlers(!) where you’re told to “Show no mercy regardless of your opponent’s ability”. Savage.

Here’s the problem, those toddlers were good, too good. I am ashamed to admit it took me 4 tries to beat them. Not because I’m a pacifier level virtual soccer player (I hope), but because the mechanics of actually playing Goalball are rough. Touching another player stuns you for several seconds and with the pixel style graphics that is oftentimes near impossible to avoid. If one of your teammates gets the ball, then control is instantly wrestled away from who you are currently controlling and jarringly switched to that player. And shooting? There is no finding a good line to blast it past the goalie, it’s kicking into the super toddler’s reflexes until their “shield” energy runs out to roll the ball past them as they lay on the ground.

There was also an unfortunate amount of technical issues during the demo experience. The game would get very confused when using a gamepad (An Xbox controller being my gamepad of choice here) and would constantly not allow me to navigate through menus without resorting to KBM. The fix? Just unplugged my keyboard – less than ideal. There was also an instance where my character got stuck when attempting to retry my showdown with the toddlers causing me to have to restart the entire experience from the absolute start. Soccertown uses an autosave feature and only utilizes a single save spot per Story Mode play through, so there was no earlier save to revert back to.
SoccerStory finds itself solidly in the C tier of games through the sheer impact of the dialogue alone, seriously, it was that funny. But I couldn’t recommend it for anyone who needs even slightly compelling gameplay to go alongside it.