Soccer Kid Collection Review

The Soccer Kid is a 2D action platformer series that first began way back in 1993 on the Amiga system. It was later ported to a myriad of consoles/home computers such as the Game Boy Advance, Super NES, Jaguar, MS-DOS; just to name a few. This newly released “collection” (should’ve been called a duology and not a collection) includes two games: the Super NES and MS-DOS versions.

The Soccer Kid games tells the story of a young soccer player who must travel the world in order to recover the fragments of the stolen trophy. In order to accomplish his goal, our young protagonist uses, as you’d expect given the theme, a soccer/football ball as a weapon.

The games are 2D action platformers where players need to go from start to finish of each level and survive (literally). As with other similar games, our hero does have a weapon: his good old trust soccer/football ball. You’ll need to kick it on enemies in order to take them down.

As with any Qubyte remaster, the game offers a handful of quality of life improvements such as saving at any time, adjusting various visual settings such as screen size, backgrounds and filters. Another feature is the ability to easily enable cheats such as infinite lives, infinite time or skip to the next level among others.

Holding the attack/kick button will let you juggle the ball yo kick it into higher platforms or respawn it. Because, given the ball isn’t glued to your foot, when it comes to platforming, you’ll need to leave it where it. There are also situations where if you kick it too far ahead or it bounces back, it can fall into a spike pit and burst. You can also find power-ups. You can also collect fruits and find chests as you explore levels.

The games look fine and they are a faithful representation of the 90s era of gaming. Levels are bright, colorful and varied. Decent enemy variety as it varies from region to region. While the levels aren’t that vast and long, they do have minor diverging path that will allow you to explore and find hidden items. The soundtrack is a generic chiptune score that you’ll drown out as you focus on speeding through levels.

The game’s biggest problem is also its most unique feature: your weapon. The ball goes into an arch when kicking it, meaning smaller enemies, such as vicious dogs or samll rats, can be easily missed with your shot. Also both you and enemies move faster than the screen so it’s easy to ram into them due to the slippery controls/momentum.

This is just another archaic game that Qubyte decided to ressurect. Soccer Kid Collection contains two of the worst games to come out of the 1990s. While the concept was interesting, the games have not aged well. The controls are slippery and movement is faster than it needed to be. Unless this series has nostalgic value or you have a morbid curiosity (like myself), go right ahead, but if you’re looking for something that plays well and want to experience something from the 90s, there are so many better options. Easy pass.