Genesis ~ Sensible Soccer Review

Overview

Sensible Soccer has to be the soccer game of the Genesis. It's all fast, fun and furious stuff, if or not you're a frantic soccer fan.

Gameplay

The objective of the game is simple. Put the ball past the goal line to score goals (like you didn't know that!). Right from the start, players are scurrying all over the place like ants. Salvaging the ball to score hard earned goals. This is what soccer is and nothing will ever change that. So what more out of gameplay could you possibly want?

10 out of 10

Graphics

No fancy pancy realistic 3D technology here. Sensible Soccer doesn't even pretend to look good. The whole game is in overhead colourful 2D, from the pitch right up to the player's kits. All the soccer players look like cute little furballs who know how to play professional football. Glorious stuff.

5 out of 5

Sound and Music

The ingame music is a fast pumping tune that revs you up during the games. However, sound effects on pitch are a bit sparse, as are the crowd noises that are awfully repetitive.

3.25 out of 5

Playability and Versatility

The controls are simple when you have poccession of the ball. 3 buttons. Lob, pass and shoot. You can only control one player at a time, so when time comes to defend, you can only slide tackle, while your other players are automatically controlled, who make a huge effort to defend; in some cases better than you. Slide tackling properly is extremely hard, because it's so easy to foul a player, rather than go for the ball.

Contolling the players is easy. You just move them according to your control pad, but these movements can be used to great effects such as side stepping.

All the rules from the real game are applied here; as far as what the game is capable of. Fouling can result in yellow and even red cards. There are throw ins, goal kicks, free kicks, corner kicks, substitutions, formational changes and so on.

But the real complaint about the playabilty is that the learning curve is far too steep. There are 3 skill levels ranging from beginner, normal and expert. At beginner level, it's relatively easy once you get the hang of the controls. You even get automatic goal targetting, where the players shoot directly at the goal when you shoot no matter where you are. When you jack it up to normal, the game gets far too serious and the automatic targetting is turned off. As for expert level, you know what. This is a real shame, because more tournaments are opened for you at a higher difficulty and it's a pity you can't play them a level you want.

However, if you are willing to sitck to the game on such a high dificulty, chances are you will get better, giving this game a very lasting appeal.

4 out of 5

Options

Options galore here! The possiblities are unlimited, because you can create and customise you own teams, players, leagues and tournaments! But of course there are already hundreds of ingame European clubs and international teams, including the big ones. Such as Manchester Utd, AC Milan and Bayern Munich. They all even have their real matching kits and if it changes in real life, you can customise them till you see fit. Some of the ingame tournaments are the real thing too, like the UEFA Cup. The tournament that caught my attention was the European Super League, where you pick one of the top European clubs and clash up with the rest in a whole season to find the one and only true champion.

Sadly though, all teams and tournaments are European based. No Brazil then.

If you then start to get a little tired of the European club or international games, you can enter the Custom team games where you can play with a galore of funny teams, such as food names, rubbish names and even zoo animals! Making your own set of teams is quick and easy. You can create you own fancy looking kits and even go all the way to customising the player's skin colour and hair. And making you own tournaments and leagues are even easier. Just set up the possible ingame perimeters such as number of teams, points for a win and you're off!

There you have it! Sensible Soccer is everything you want with more extras that you can live without thrown in.

4.75 out of 5

For: Fast, furious and fun gameplay, simple graphics, more than enough options, loads of tournaments, furry little players.

Against: Not much detail on the ingame pitch sounds, based only in Europe, extremely steep learning curve.