Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
With football games flooding the UK video game chart at the moment, anyone would think the country has gone football mad. Of course, it has, despite the England team performing about as poorly as everyone had feared, and looking about as likely to win the World Cup as Peter Crouch being told he’s too short to go on a ride at Alton Towers. We’ve had the official World Cup game from EA, Sensible Soccer has made a comeback, PES 5 went budget, and now PSP owners have World Tour Soccer 2 to throw into the mix. Rather amazingly, this is the eighth football game to be released on the PSP – a system that hasn’t even been available in the UK for a full year. Is it one beautiful game too many?
Rather than simply offering more of the same, but with a different title, World Tour Soccer tried to tailor the experience to the PSP. Instead of making games a matter of who scores the most goals, a challenge element was introduced, awarding players for successful passes, tackles and goals, while penalising players for awry tackles and goals conceded. It essentially made the time leading up to a goal just as important as the goal itself. World Tour Soccer 2 builds on this, offering plenty more challenge-based gameplay and a few new additions.
World Tour mode is understandably your main port of call, and offers a series of challenges grouped into continents. You’ll need to achieve a medal in each challenge, with gold, silver or bronze being awarded based on the points you earn during the match. The numerous challenge types include ‘The all-rounder’, where you must pass to every player before being able to score, and the ‘Zone’ mode, where different points are awarded depending on the part of the pitch you’re in. The variety in challenge types keeps things fresh, and makes World Tour Soccer feel very different to the FIFAs and Pro Evolution Soccers of the world.
Medal Mode offers a whole new set of challenges to complete, with each set being separated by challenge type. This is just as entertaining as the World Tour mode, but if you’ve played the World Tour mode for any considerable period of time, Medal mode won’t offer much of a challenge. The World Tour mode itself doesn’t really get going until you’re about half way through. It makes things easy to pick up and play for the majority of PSP owners, but seasoned players will find that the ease of victory becomes a little repetitive.
As an actual game of football, not a set of football mini-games, World Tour Soccer 2 offers a fun arcade-style experience. Gameplay doesn’t approach the depth seen in PES and FIFA, but the basics of passing and shooting are handled well enough. When through on goal you don’t get the sense of being in complete control that you do when playing PES, but if you’re looking for a point and shoot style experience, this will do the job nicely.
The Exhibition mode allows up to four players to go head to head wirelessly, and the arcade-style gameplay makes the game more accessible to football novices than other football titles available for the PSP. New to this year’s game is full 1v1 online play through the PSP’s Infrastructure mode, so you don’t have to know another person with the game in order to play some multiplayer games. A game share option would have been a nice addition, if only for a basic game type, but it wasn’t to be this year, with a shareable demo being the only way to let your friends play the game.
The club teams from last year’s game are strangely absent, but the use of the FIFPRO licence means that international teams feature real players and likenesses. You get the usual mix of impressive look-alikes and those that require a glance at the name on the shirt in order to be identified. Presentation on the whole is good, with a generally solid frame rate, impressive stadiums and perfectly adequate commentary. The sound effects that accompany the challenges are a little strange at first, and the camera angles are either too close or a little too distant, but given the system it’s running on World Tour Soccer 2 is a smart package.
If you’re looking for a real football experience on the PSP, this really can’t be recommended over Pro Evolution Soccer or FIFA. If you’ve already got your traditional football fix, though, World Tour Soccer 2 offers something that neither of the big boys does. It’s an arcade game, so don’t expect to be putting together beautiful free-flowing moves that Brazil would be proud of, but the challenges make for a game that feels very different to normal football, and a title that will fill the gaps between World Cup matches very well indeed.
