Super Arcade Soccer 2021 Review

Super Arcade Soccer 2021 is a typical soccer, or football if you prefer, game where players needs to pick a team and they’ll face off on the field. You can shoot, pass, trip/take away the ball from opposing players. When it comes to shooting, holding down the shoot or pass button will allow you to give your shot a bit of bang for your buck.

You can also switch characters at any time to try to get your closer to the opposing team player with the ball. As you’d expect, you can also headbutt the ball when it’s coming towards you. The controller also has a face button delegated to Center, but when you press it, it’s the same exact thing as shooting.

The game has a limited gameplay value. You can do a quick match, Competition and Training. The first option is pretty much self explanatory. Whereas competition lets you choose between League and Clubs. The former lets you select between SAS America 2021 and SAS Europe 2021. While the latter offers a handful of leagues to play such as Spain Liga, England League, Alega; just to name a few. Finally, Training isn’t much training per se as your team is on an empty and you can practice everything; although it feels a bit useless not practicing against another team.

The game looks has a familiar cartoon-ish look where its players feel like a mix of Nintendo’s Miis and Xbox cartoon characters from the game Kinect Adventures. The playground look fine; nothing special here. If you see one, you’ve seen them all. On the audio side of things, nothing of note. The crowd noise feel overkill and absolutely do not match the sluggish action on screen.

While I haven’t played many soccer/football games since the NES era with World Cup, I can’t imagine being so problematic. The first nuisance is the fact that the player you control changes automatically sometime with no indicator as to whom you’re controlling so you’re left trying to find your character. Sometimes, once it switches players, he remains frozen/unresponsive for a second making you lose precious time.

Also the passing system absolutely does not work. The game will make you control the player it thinks you’re aiming for when passing; instead of you know waiting the player has the ball. I lost track of how many times the ball simply bounced off the head of my receiving player instead of actually capting the ball. Shooting does not work either. Every time I was facing the goal, I was aiming forward yet the ball would should randomly elsewhere instead of towards the goal.

Super Arcade Soccer 2021 is a pretty barebone soccer/football experience that can fill a few minutes of gaming; especially with friends. The mediocre control take a while to get used to. Trying to pass to other players barely succeeds, it’s annoying having the game change the player you control on a whim leaving you scrambling and shooting is ridiculous. Buy at your own risk; or instead why not save up for EA’s yearly experience for a proper soccer/football experience.