Pure Football - Review
The World Cup is now in full swing, so it's easy to presume that the majority of the globe is pretty hyped about the tournament.
With that in mind, Ubisoft have decided to try and capitalise on this by releasing a game endorsed by England and Liverpool superstar, Steven Gerrard, called Pure Football. Unlike most of the other football games though, Pure Football is a 5-a-side affair. It promotes a much more arcade feel.
The Campaign Mode starts off with a custom-made nation, and a bunch of rag-tag players. You then get the chance to make your own player, who will be the mainstay of the team throughout the campaign. The team, as expected, starts in the bottom ranking spot and to progress they must win events. Winning will typically promote a player's team up the rankings by one spot, but it's also possible to fall down the rankings by losing.
There are a few different scenarios to each event. These range from winning by x amount of goals, winning a timed match or taking part in a tournament with three other teams.
The amount of variety isn't exactly huge and with only 17 different teams, there isn't much variety overall either, not even all of the nations are competing in the World Cup. As players progress through the campaign, they will go against progressively harder teams and in each match, it's possible to obtain players from the opposition teams by meeting certain objectives.
This could be, scoring a certain amount of goals, having a good pass percentage completion rate, or only allowing a certain amount of opposition shots. Once they're unlocked, they can then be selected for the player's team. Pure points can also be unlocked, via gameplay, and these are used to upgrade the created player from the start.
The gameplay is based around a 5-a-side mechanic, and in essence, it's all very simple. Players can pass, shoot, play a long ball or a through ball. Nothing out of the ordinary, but how they work is, due to the arcade nature of the game, slightly different.
As the game is called 'Pure Football', some aspects of the game rely on a 'Pure' mechanic. Whenever shooting or crossing, players are greeted with a circular bar which fills up. It initially starts green, then has a small segment of white, and red afterwards. The green section denotes a normal action, with differing power, but the white option denotes a 'Pure' action.
This is the best that can be done and doing this will add 'Pure' points, which can be used to upgrade things. If the bar gets into the red, this denotes a bad action, so a shot will go off target and a cross won't meet another player.
The problem with most of the actions is that they just aren't overly responsive. Passing is a bit annoying, because AI players don't necessarily move into useful positions, crossing is sometimes temperamental as to when it wants to work.
The through ball isn't really anything of the sort, it's just a manual pass in a straight line which players can control the strength of. The defensive side of the game doesn't hold up much better either, as the normal tackling can be quite annoying.
Holding down the 'pressure' button causes players to shadow their opponents, but it's not possible to run while doing this. It's also possible to side-step, but even if a tackle is made there's no guarantee the defender will win the ball. If this is the case, a reckless sliding tackle will certainly bring them down, and as there's no ref, there's no penalty - unless consecutive fouls are committed.
The system initially feels very boring and clunky, but it does seem quite competent after a while. However, it's more about adapting to the system, than the system actually becoming good. It performs its task of being a football game, but there's very little inspiring about it, and with the defensive side of the game being quite poor, conceding bad goals is quite a realistic possibility.
Graphically, Pure Football is pretty decent. Each of the 230 players present in the game do actually look like their real-life counterparts though, which is impressive.
Upon completing the Career Mode, it's possible to upload the finished created player for the rest of the world to buy. To compete online, players must re-create a team, plus any secret (legend) characters they unlocked throughout the career mode.
The online is plagued with lag though, something which absolutely ruins the game as timing is exceedingly crucial. The age old problem of 'Quitters' is as apparent as any other online footy game, which is very disappointing.
Despite this, Ubisoft have attempted to take online seriously, with plenty of unlocks available and a league system, but other aspects are very inadequate.
Pure Football is a pretty solid 5-a-side football game, but it doesn't really excel in any way.
Steps have been taken to make the online experience a good one, but it's let down severely by lag and quitters. The actual gameplay is quite clunky and the career mode is also pretty short. It appears this wouldn't have seen the light of day had it not been World Cup year.
6 / 10
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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