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Score! Classic Goals purports to be an entertaining puzzle game even if you’re not a fan of football, which is very fortunate because I am not a football fan, I have no idea what the offside rule actually is and I’m not even sure what constitutes a classic goal so I certainly don’t have the ability to recognise or score one.
I can, however, confirm that Score! Classic Goals is an entertaining puzzle game even if you’re not a fan of football. I know that there’s a recreation of some kick that Gazza did to score a goal, or something Beckham did once, but it doesn’t really matter because really Score! is still entertaining underneath its well-produced football wrapper. If anything, the game only heightened my appreciation of a sport I normally care nothing about – which is more than I can say for FIFA, so well done to First Touch Games.
The idea is to replicate some classic international goals from the past forty years, with a top-down shot of the history you’re aiming to reproduce fed to you before you’re in charge of swiping the play-by-play moments and flicking the final satisfying punt into the back of the net (that’s a football term, right?).
Fluff up your line drawing and you will essentially break history, causing the physics-bending curve of the ball to go into the hands of the goalie. At the beginning your flicks only control direction of the ball, but at later difficulty levels the speed of your swipes will also judge how hard the ball is kicked.
The game’s ultimate success is that scoring these reportedly classic goals is actually very satisfying, though seeing as the game is unlicensed you’d need to be a real football nut to recognise who’s actually doing what when the classic goal in question is lifted from the group stages of an obscure Asian tournament. And if you’re the kind of studious fan who’s really into these classic goals maybe that might take some of the shine off, but as you might expect it didn’t really affect my experience.
While the fundamentals are excellent, however, a few of the incidental details could do with a bit of work. The game’s typical three-star scoring system is way too obtuse, for instance, and the scoring system isn’t particularly well explained so it can be very hard to tell why some of your shots get full marks where others are punished with a solitary star.
Still, the game’s excellent presentation – it’s got a vibe of one of those football magazines your friends (or even you, perhaps) used to buy when you were a kid – and responsive, tactile nature make playing it a simple, punchy delight. I might have no idea what constitutes a classic goal, but it’s impossible not to notice that Score! is a quality game.
Version Tested: iPad
