After Apple’s interesting keynote last night came some more new games for the iTunes App Store. One of these is one which I have been eagerly awaiting -- a real football sports simulation game.  Now I was never going to expect to get FIFA or Pro Evo style on the first effort and with this relatively unknown game I was slightly cautious on what to expect.  I plunged for the £5.99 price and loaded it up which to my amazement was a real surprise. A good surprise at that.

I was granted with a clean, well designed interface very similar to the Pro Evolution soccer series.  It became even clearer after I had gone through the menu systems and into the actual game itself.  You can tell that the game has gone through a lot of testing to make it just right -- and it works.  Further similarities from Pro Evo come from the licensing agreements; the Premiership teams incorrectly called: Man Red, Man Blue, Merseyside with the rest correct (Chelsea,Aston Villa,Fulham etc.) but they all still suffer from made up logos and not the official ones but they have pretty much all the players correct names.  I am really surprised how much they have crammed in (198 teams) -- with all the big teams and leagues: England, Spain, Italy, France, Germany as well as international teams and more it is amazing what they do with 60mb on a mobile device.  To be perfectly honest you would pay at least £20.00 for something with this amount of teams on the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP.

The graphic models of the players is above what you’d expect for a mobile game but just below what something like a dedicated games console PSP could produce.  However for a first effort its really good and sets the benchmark for the future of sports titles.  Another small gripe, I do like to be picky, is some of the transfers; the major signings from the summer are there like Deco to Chelsea but some smaller players have not made it to the teams.  On the other hand I am sure with Apples long vetting process the game was made before the end of the transfer window so I expect this small fix to be done with the next update.

The control system is a lover and a hater -- it makes or breaks this App. As it’s practically impossible to create a sports game on touch alone the developers Gameloft have opted to do the majority of actions through a traditional D-pad and two buttons implanted on the touch screen.  It makes the game feel like old school if you know what I mean but also quite hard to get used to however with a bit of practice, and it doesn’t take much, you get to know the advanced techniques.  For instance a simple pass is a tap of B, but to perform a cross it is tapping B and flicking your finger up.  It seems complicated but it’s really easy and intuative on the game and helps the free flowing motion.  See the video below for some working action.

As with most sport titles there are many modes to play around with -- Cup, League, Penalty Kicks, Training and Exhibition matches -- you’ll never have nothing to do.  There is a significant amount of playback value and I think you’ll be coming back to it soon enough especially with future updates promising multiplayer Wi-fi games -- it could make this a must have App for any iPhone or iPod Touch.