Soccer Story – Review

The Apple Cup is the Soccer Story equivalent of the F.A cup. All the greatest teams from across the land have a chance at glory, and Soccer Story starts off as you’re tasked with scoring a goal in the final of the cup. but as the ball hits the back of the net, disaster strikes, resulting in “soccer Inc” taking control and banning all Football matches except for their own official games.

This is where the real story begins as controls shifts to one of the players twin children, who are minding their own business, when a magical ball comes crashing through the window.
Let’s clear things up, while I’m English and always use Football, for the sake of this review, let’s stick to calling it Soccer, just for ten minutes, even though there’s even an option in the language settings to switch from “English: Soccer” to “English: Football”.

After a brief chat with your mum, you find the Soccer ball in the garden and then it magically shoots off towards the nearby pitch. There’s a little bit of leg work, but you’ll eventually take control of the magical ball with the endeavour to bring Soccer back to the land, and maybe even follow in your father’s footsteps to the Apple Cup final.
It’s not all straight forward because most people are frightened to even use the term Soccer (or Football) except for the two always arguing on what to call the popular sport.
Your journey continues as you take on the task of building your own team by gradually persuading people to play, and then you’ll need to arrange matches, by running small errands for characters in each area to access regional cups in the hope of working towards the Apple Cup.

With Soccer Inc always on the look out, you’ll have to avoid their nasty monopolising tricks and slowly gain access to new areas by unlocking various new boots which will allow you to walk on sand and access the beach, as well as swim so you can explore the nearby waters.
There’s a really nice flow to progression with a few tasks on the road to each new match, area and regional cup without forcing you to do too much of one thing before moving on.
This does mean progression is fairly quick for an RPG, with a full play-through likely to last about 8-10 hours, but there’s a handful of side-quests in each area, such as hitting targets, which will unlock extra upgrade tokens if you complete them.

These upgrade tokens are for Speed, Shooting, Energy and Strength. Powering up your character is the priority, but you’ll also need to throw a few upgrades over to your 4 team-mates, to make later matches easier.
During the actual Soccer matches, you take control of the entire team (well, the goalkeeper is automated) in a 4-minute match, it’s pretty straight forward with A to pass, B to shoot and X to slide-tackle, and with no referee, you’re welcome to dive in and flatten anyone fortunate enough to get the ball off you for a few seconds. There’s also the speed burst (LT).
I did find the actual games pretty easy, with the overactive goalkeepers the only real hurdle, but if you fire enough shots at them, they soon get tired and the ball will end up in the back of the net.

While exploring the world, you’ll also be able to summon the ball with Y and kick it around, which is how you’ll complete most of those quests, as well as using LT to sprint for race challenges, you’ll also be able to use the right stick for manual aiming allowing you to hit awkward targets, this makes upgrades equally useful outside of a match, hence making sure you prioritise your character before your team-mates, especially with speed and shooting.

While certainly on the easier side for a more experienced gamer like myself, you can make matches a little tougher with easy, normal and hard difficulty settings.
There is a little challenge in getting all available upgrade tokens, but this also means replaying many tasks 3 times, which can feel a little repetitive, and considering you can get your own stats to 5/5 in most areas, as well as a few tokens for your team mates long before the half-way point, it’s not really necessary to search out every upgrade token you can find.

Graphically, Soccer Story, has the SNES feeling of the late 90’s era, with pixelated graphics, but it’s all very well done, bright and colourful and still well detailed. The sound is a little basic, with a pretty dull and repetitive track in the background, and with no voice acting, you’re relying on a few sound effects and ambient sounds to give your ears anything memorable.

Available for £16.74, it’s certainly not a bad price, and with enough gameplay to last most people a good ten hours and enough variety to prevent too much repetition it’s great value too.

It’s not all goals and celebrations though, as there was a few issues besides having to repeat side-quest mini-games multiple times for the upgrade tokens, The main problem I encountered was the game becoming unresponsive and requiring a restart after completing the Volleyball mini-game, forcing me to abandon that game and the shiny upgrade token for the 3rd win, unfortunately that issue continued on both Xbox Series X and Series S so it seems more than a one off, and while I’m hoping it’s quickly fixed with a patch, it’s worth mentioning.

Gameplay wise, as mentioned above, it’s a little too simple for experienced gamers, and the pretty simple writing and flat conversations, and the RPG-lite elements remain pretty shallow, it reinforces that it’s aimed at those in their teens or younger.
That certainly doesn’t mean older gamers won’t enjoy it, but don’t jump in to a two footed tackle without expecting a yellow card.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed my time with Soccer Story, it has some great details down to welcoming both boys and girls as well as fans regardless of whether they call it Football or Soccer, integrating gameplay elements throughout makes it accessible without going over the top on depth and narration, but I just wish there was a little more to it long-term, rather than fleshing out longevity repeating tasks, even a slightly different race course would be more entertaining than the exact same thing with 5 seconds less on the already generous clock.

If you head into the stadium without expecting too much, there’s a giant killing game to be enjoyed, but if you want a deep, engrossing RPG you’ll struggle to reach half-time.

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