Nick Adams Games Blog

Mario and football: it’s certainly an unlikely mix. Sure, the Mario name has been lent to racing and fighting with the releases of Mariokart and Smash Bros respectively, but the football element doesn’t seem like it would gel successfully. Perhaps this is because football is not hugely big in either Mario’s native Japan or his second home in America. Bearing this in mind, you should groom yourself to expect a game not so much about football, but more like a distorted video game translation of it.

Its almost as if Mario hastily thumbed through the football rulebook, threw it out the window and rewrote it from scratch. The 5 a side football rules intact are: goalkeepers, passing the ball and tackling. An absence of a referee indicates there are no throw ins, no penalties and definitely no offside rule! What you’re left with is a simple extremely frantic, aggressive fast paced game.

The simplicity of this is reinforced by the control scheme: this game uses 4 main buttons. These are to pass, shoot, tackle and use special items. Shaking the Wii remote results in an aggressive tackle. This type of control scheme is very inviting whilst still allowing for some depth at higher levels.

If you hold down the shoot button your character stands still, do this for long enough and they will leap into the upper stratosphere and rain down up to 6 footballs at the unfortunate goalkeeper! When your opponent does this move on you, you’ll have to point the Wii mote at the screen and shoot the footballs down as they appear. During play as your team gets viciously fowled you’re compensated with special items such as banana skins, shell projectiles and invincibility stars to retaliate with.

There are 12 selectable team captains and a choice of 8 lesser characters to fill the other ranks. Every character has their own signature goal shots, and their own set of tricks they can do while they’re dribbling the ball. All of the team captains also have their own special ability they can use, e.g. Donkey Kong does his signature ground pound move he learned from Donkey Kong Country, wrecking havoc on everything within his seismic radius. Each character also has their theme tune when they score with punchy beats and bass lines.

Tellingly, the pitches in this game are called ‘arenas’, and almost all of them are barricaded in by electric fencing. This is ideal to barge the opposition into to get possession of the ball. Some of them have random events taking place during the game, like large patches of lava raining down and incinerating unlucky players in the lava pit stage. These are incredibly frustrating when you’re attacking but a godsend during the tense moments when the opposition is about to score against you.

Luckily in the vs mode, its possible to play the game without too many silly gimmicks. There are options to turn off the manic 6 goal super strikes and to select sensible arenas that don’t sport lots of random obstacles and obstructions. There are other options you can adjust too but first you must unlock these by playing it in single player.

Single player is split up into 3 game modes. ‘Strikers ABC’ is a tutorial mode whisking your through the special moves, special items and tactics. ‘Challenge’ mode puts you in increasingly difficult scenarios where you have to beat the computer leading on goals or with a team outnumbering yours. Finally there’s the traditional league mode, where you select your team and see them through an assortment of cups and rewards. Even if you exhaust this mammoth checklist, there will always be the challenge of online play.

Online gaming wasn’t possible on the Wii before this release, so how well does it work? The cumbersome and controversial friend code system has been carried over from the Nintendo DS, but you can play similar ranked people straight away in the online tournament league. Online play is reassuringly lag free, despite how frantic the game gets.

And this game can get extremely frantic. Sometimes there’s so much going on its difficult to keep track of the ball when there’s obstacles appearing and special items being used. This game can also seem extremely frustrating at times when you’re in limbo as your opponent uses special moves that can’t be interrupted.

It goes without saying that if you’re looking for a realistic football simulator, or even something remotely close to that, this is definitely not for you. But if you’re happy to explore a fast paced, over the top version of football, Mario’s interpretation of this sport is definitely worth checking out.

8/10