Urban Freestyle Soccer Critic Reviews

An engaging and challenging urban adaptation of the sport, Freestyle Street Soccer offers a solid arcade sporting experience. Balancing traditional soccer gameplay with easy-to-execute tricks and stunts, the game is simple to play.

The problems start with control. The response isn't razor sharp, the special moves aren't spectacular, and the Netbuster specials are too easy to pull off.

Passing and shooting in these high-scoring battles is as easy as squeezing the trigger on an Uzi, but complicated button-mashing for trick moves, muddy graphics, and a schizophrenic soundtrack of Method Man, TLC, and Foo Fighters all draw red cards.

Squarely intent on holding the middle ground in every sense of the phrase, this isn't a terrible game, but it isn't especially good, either.

The problem is that many of the tricks you do with the ball simply don't work. Worse yet is the abyssmal AI - particularly for the goalies.

It's yet another example of a distinctly average "extreme sports" game that lacks the polish and creativity of the real-life sportsmen it's trying to emulate-slash-harness.

There's also a full set of uninteresting urban ethnic stereotypes rendered in starkly dated graphics and loudmouth fake gangsta sound bites.

The gang vernacular and the gratuitous use of swearing may make this game appear cool but you may as well listen to an Andrew Dice Clay recording and play with a string-less yo-yo.

If nothing else, this game should serve as a fine example of what not to do when developing a street sports game, and if it serves this purpose well, hopefully no one will ever have to endure another urban-themed train wreck like Freestyle Street Soccer.

The realization that the game looks like crap is essentially an afterthought...This would pass as a minigame mode in "FIFA" or "Winning Eleven," but no way is it ready to stand on its own.