World Tour Soccer 06

SCEA's soccer title is best described as soccer with an arcade twist.

Although the PSP hasn’t had a lot of marquee titles lately, one thing it has is soccer games. There’s FIFA 07, Winning Eleven and now World Tour Soccer. Fresh off this year’s World Cup, I figured I could go for some soccer excitement on the go.

World Tour Soccer should not be attempted to be played on the same level as Winning Eleven. This year’s version focuses more on arcade-like challenges and less on leagues and championships. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but you should know that going in to the game if you’re a soccer purist.

Game modes aren’t very deep: there’s the World Tour where you move from continent to continent playing other national teams with specific challenges. This is definitely not to be confused with a traditional World Cup mode. For example you’ll start your World Tour challenge in Africa. There are six games that you have to play there, but each game has a different requirement.

In "Classic Challenge" you receive points for goals, shots and passes, while you lose points for poor challenges and fouls. You’ll need to earn a certain number of points in order to medal for that game…obviously the higher the level, the more points you’ll need.

"Shot Clock" is an interesting one – in it, you have a limited amount of time to hit the shoot button. You don’t necessarily have to take a shot on goal, but you do have to shoot. It’s not has hard as it seems as you can get across the pitch pretty quickly.

"All Rounder" requires you to have every player on your team touch the ball (including the keeper) before allowing you to score. There are many other modes including being down men (totally outnumbered). All are fun to attempt but again, not really like real soccer.

In addition to the World Tour mode, there’s also the traditional exhibition mode, online multiplayer mode, and medal mode. In medal mode, you’ll be playing specific challenges rather than against specific countries.

Once you select your mode and your team you’ll be able to choose your team’s kit and you’re ready to go. The game does take a little while to load. We’re not talking WWE like load times, but it’s not a short time either.

When playing the games, controls are pretty intuitive, with one exception: the shot and pass buttons are reversed – square is a shot and circle is a cross. Using the control stick is not a problem however and once you remember which button does what, it’s not a problem.

Graphics are very impressive – uniform details are very good – you definitely know the USA team just by looking at the kit. Player rosters aren’t bad, but they could be better. You’ll know a majority of the US team players.

The play by play commentary is very good and doesn’t get repetitive. In game strategy is very well done, even if this were a simulation game. In addition to setting your formation, you can also set the line of the formation. Quite often in games you can select 4-4-2, but you can’t say if those two are up front side by side or on the wings instead of center. Some may say it’s a 4-4-1-1, but I think it’s pretty neat that you can do a 4-4-2 with a variation.

I like the gameplay of this soccer game. Everything seems very smooth and fluid. Passing seems to be a work of art, and you can really see fouls being committed. Quite often when you try to perform a sliding tackle in other soccer games, it makes it very difficult to not get a foul call. In WTS, you’ll see your player attempt to get the ball when doing a slide tackle. If he doesn’t get the ball, you can see why a foul is called. There are players flopping just like real soccer. The ref seems fair; however there are no linesmen in this game either, which is a perennial pet peeve of mine. All of the rules of regular soccer are included (such as offside) but there’s no strategy – you can’t call an offside trap, for example.

Make sure you adjust your gameplay options to "manual" player selection rather than automatic. Automatic player selection in game never helps you, and in fact it can hurt you – as soon as you catch up to your opponent, it seems as though the system will change your player and it’s rather frustrating.

If this were a console game, I’d be rather upset with the limited number of play modes; however the modes fit the PSP perfectly and makes a good pick up and play game. While I’d like to play a league mode with a schedule, if you can over look that you’ll have an enjoyable arcade-like soccer game.

Review by Dan 'The Man' Clarke - courtesy of Gameshark.com