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Intro Somewhere along the line, beach volleyball's influence spread to the world of soccer, which is arguably simultaneously the world's most popular and best team sport but can be a chore to watch. Four on four plus two goal-keepers, in the sand, on the beach, with "cheerleaders" dancing in the center during intermissions and pre-game. Sounds like it would be a blast to play, like beach volleyball, but DreamCatcher's first venture on the Xbox is an unpolished mess that needed a little, no a lot, more time in the oven. Gameplay: 4/10 Oh, where to begin. The premise here is sound as are some of the fundamentals. The ball stops on a dime as one would expect in sand and the players are represented via 32+ teams that you can select from who will be playing in 4 venues, day or night, in multiple modes of play. One can selectively pass to individuals that are designated by the player or merely play the ball to whoever is upfield. You have a few selections to try to dribble or deke by your opponents and have bursts of speed via your right trigger that will drain you character the more you use it. The defensive tackles are sorely limited and the passing system seems to work at inconsistent intervals at best. If you've played EA's FIFA series or Konami's various soccer entities you will want to stay as far away from this as humanly possible. Even if you're remotely interested in playing soccer, it's strongly urged that you play any other soccer game before this one. It's that bad. When the player closest to the ball is selected by pressing the L1 trigger, he can be controlled for a time and then for no apparent reason you become someone else. One repeatedly presses the shoot button and nothing seems to happen but then, like a tape delay, all of a sudden the player will shoot, and it'll leave you scratching your head wondering how that happened. The goalie dives in the wrong direction for balls, refuses to pick a ball up that's right next to him, or throws the ball directly to your opponents skull who subsequently gets a shot on goal. There's a "God" power up that rewards with artistic points (?!?) via a meter and eventually rewards the player (and your opponent, who has a similar gage) with a limited time gift of your players not getting tired. You'll find that not only do you not care about getting that reward but that it serves very little purpose in a game that's so marred and unfinished that you're so busy seeing everything that's wrong with this title to pay attention to that meter anyway. If the game is played and the score
is tied, then there's an overtime mode to try to finish the thing with a "golden
goal". Well, god forbid that you don't because the shootout phase in another
exercise in futility as your opponent will miss the net entirely and you'll have
little control of the outcome of the game. Nothing is as frustrating as spending
your time to play a game only to the outcome be determined by something that plays
as well as a coin toss. A similar scenario can be noticed on the free kick where
you inexplicably cannot pass and can only shoot, no matter where you are on the
field - even on the defensive end next to your own goal posts.
Graphics: 6/10 Sound:
3/10 Control:
4/10 Overall:
3.5/10 [ top ] | |||
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