Pure Football ^{(Xbox 360)}

Genre: Sports Publisher: Ubisoft Developer: Ubisoft Players: 1-4

By Keith B (21st Jun 2010)

If this had been a modern take on the Bitmap Brothers’ Speedball then it could have had some retro merit, but as a football game it's rarely anything more than stupid.

Football is the in-thing at the minute, so cash-in releases are to be expected. But while Pure Football is certainly a poor game, the fact it retails for only a few bucks means you can’t really accuse it of being a cash-in, although it contains just about everything on the list of expected fails that movie tie-in games often have.

Football games don’t need a story. There shouldn’t need to be some reason for kicking a ball around, trying to score goals while deftly skipping around opponents, the sport itself is reason enough to play. All a football game has to do is football, and do it well, because that’s all we ask for. Ubisoft hasn’t given us that though. What we do have is a stupid notion that the likes of Steven Gerrard or Lionel Messi would take to the park for some five-a-side action, with no referee, after one or the other loses a game on the world stage. That’s likely to happen - Christiano Ronaldo hoofing a ball around a local park to salvage some sort of lost pride. Right.

While the art style is relatively effective, body proportions are often way out.

So Pure Football isn’t about football at all, it’s actually a five-a-side game, of which there aren’t many because, well, why spend your money on a five-a-side game when there are a couple of proper, fully featured football games on the market already? Why indeed.

When you start, you create a team and pick your logo, name and colours from a list, and you create your team captain. Unexpectedly, the customisation feature is deep and it’s reasonably easy to find yourself spending half an hour allocating stat points and tweaking some generic hairdo before you realise you haven’t kicked a ball yet. So after completing your customisation it is off to the pitch for some football, the ‘authentic experience’ the box art says is contained within.

The entire game is based on completing challenges in order to get your team to the top of the rankings in 28 days, with each city on the game map featuring four items that must be completed before you can progress to the next city. Beat an opponent in normal time or win by more than two goals, the objectives are pretty standard fare for anyone who has dabbled in the Road to the World Cup part of FIFA South Africa or the Reliving History part of the full FIFA games. The entire premise of the game falls apart in the first few minutes though, as you realise that although you may be playing Portugal or Argentina, as long as you meet certain match conditions (get X shots on goal, prevent the opponent stringing more than six passes together at any time) you get to transfer players from other countries into your team.

Come see Lionel Messi...now at your local botanical gardens.

The football itself is awful, bearing absolutely no resemblance to the World Game at all, aside from the fact the players are using their feet to strike something spherical. As if the clunky movement wasn’t enough – you can only move in eight directions, not the fluid 360 degree motion of the FIFA games - the passing and shooting are ridiculous too. You don’t get to aim your shot; instead the computer takes care of all that, and rips the player out of the moment to do so. Any time you cross the ball, try to header it, volley it or just about anything else, the game turns a funny colour and slows down time, to give you a chance to try and hit the sweet spot on the power bar and strike a ‘pure’ shot. It’s pretty hard to be any good at it, and even then unless you’re right in front of the goal the odds are on that the goalie will save it anyway, power shot or not.

Although there is no referee, there is a gradual meter that fills every time you commit a foul and once the Foul bar fills, the opposing team get a penalty. It doesn’t matter that your last foul may have occurred at the other end of the pitch, once that glowing red meter fills up it’s a penalty. Again, it makes little sense and flies in the face of the whole ‘no rules’ theme.

This makes it look far more exciting than it ever is.

The Pure bar fills every time you do anything productive, like crack a shot at goal or string some passes together. Once that bar fills, your next shot will be a Pure Shot, meaning it could either help you score from miles away or maybe not do much at all. It’s hard to tell if it’s the AI being inept or the game’s physics engine, but either way you’re never really assured that a power shot will do what it’s supposed to. Throw in the fact that most games are over in three minutes, you may just have enough time to fill the bar once before full time arrives. Passing is similarly lame, borrowing heavily from FIFA (the layouts are almost identical), but coupling the freedom of one touch passing with the clunkiness of power bar passing is something that will provide continual frustration. The difficulty spike dies on its ass when you learn that you can walk the ball from anywhere in the pitch to the opponent’s box, with opposing players backing away from you all the time, and then score.

Although you may be playing at venues with names like The Glass House in Liverpool, or The Pit in Madrid, each pitch is an uninspired square in some bizarre setting. From what appear to be massive lounge rooms to gaudy silver locations it’s devoid of any interesting elements. Astoundingly, for all the absolute bullshit contained within, it does do one thing right – it features all the real world teams, the squad sheets and likenesses. How Ubisoft managed to swing that I’ll never know.

The guy in the middle looks like he's playing air guitar, which would be more fun than playing this.

Pure Football is a terrible game, primarily because it has barely anything to do with football, but things could have been different. Instead of trying to be FIFA Street it could have been given a coat of paint to make it futuristic, called it Speedball 2010, and I think I would have enjoyed it. In a strange way the simplicity could have been an appealing factor, if it had the gameplay to match. Unfortunately it isn’t Speedball 2010, it’s a stupid football game, and there really isn’t much to keep you interested beyond an hour or two. Even for the paltry AU$29 I paid, I couldn’t recommend it.

2.3

Single Play

2.1

Friend Play

0.8

Multi Play

2.2

Graphics

2.5

Sound

3.5

Challenge