The world of football video games has been dominated over the years by EA’s FIFA (now EA Sports FC) behemoth. Many have made attempts to capture a piece of the football video game pie, but in recent years the quality products available to football fans have been light, to say the least. What if you don’t enjoy EA FC and want a more casual experience? Well, Sociable Soccer 24 is here and it wants a space in your hard drive’s starting lineup.
Remember Sensible World of Soccer? It was one of the Amiga’s best video games in the 90s and a cult classic for lots of football fans growing up watching Football Italia on Channel 4. Now the creator of the original game, Jon Hare, is back with Sociable Soccer and the once-Steam exclusive is now available on Nintendo Switch and coming later this year to Xbox and Playstation. But is it any good? Or should you stick to EA’s video game Goliath?
Sociable Soccer first launched as a mobile game for iPhone on Apple Arcade back in 2021, but this new version arrives on console with updated rosters for the 2023/24 season. Like a lot of other football titles, there aren’t official licences for teams, with no authentic badge crests, kits, and names like Ashburton Grove (Arsenal). That said, the game shines with 13,000 FIFPRO licenced players at its disposal bringing all the faces you know and love to life with official images and playstyles similar to their real-life abilities.
Just like Sensible Soccer, the game is easy to learn and hard to master aimed at bringing the best arcade football experience back to fans of the sport. Sociable Soccer 24 is easy to pick up and play utilising just a few buttons to pass, tackle, and shoot. Complex systems like the ability to bend the ball after you’ve kicked it add to the difficulty with lots of depth in gameplay on your road to mastering the mechanics.
I found myself thoroughly enjoying the gameplay, it’s addictive and challenging with a nice dose of nostalgia that makes you miss the old days of arcade football games. There’s even a camera angle to replicate the up/down style of Sensible Soccer, perfect for curling a shot into the top corner.
There’s plenty here for everyone to get their teeth stuck into with multiple game modes to choose from. The main game mode is called Career and works similarly to the Master Leagues on Pro Evolution Soccer of old. You choose your team and start with a random selection of players, all with low stats and not much to write home about.
As you progress up divisions you can upgrade your existing players to get them better stats and bring in better player cards, similar to EA FC Ultimate Team. There are no microtransactions here which is pretty refreshing considering we’ve become so used to paying to improve teams in football games, but it’s all a bit luck of the draw and it’ll take a while to get the players you really want to play with. There’s also no transfer market or anything like that, so you can’t save up and buy a particular player or sell someone from your roster to a rival team.
Elsewhere, the World mode lets you choose from over 1,000 international teams and play across 78 different competitions as you look to fill up your trophy cabinet. This is where I enjoyed Sociable Soccer 24 the most as I took Chelsea to a third European Cup and my beloved Scotland all the way to Berlin for the Euro 2024 final (one can dream).
At launch, the Nintendo Switch version lacks online multiplayer, but my experience with online on Steam Deck wasn’t great anyway, to say the least. Unless you have friends that also own this game, you’ll find a hard time playing someone on the internet — hopefully, the game has some success, and the developer makes it easier to get into online lobbies because at the moment you need to share a code with a mate to even link up. As its name would suggest, local multiplayer is a different story producing fantastic couch play that will have the loser between you and your mates begging for a rematch.
Sociable Soccer 24 is a welcome addition to the world of football video games and a refreshing take on a genre seemingly plagued with microtransactions and sweaty meta gameplay. At first, I couldn’t put the game down, banging in goals left, right, and centre with John McGinn but as my week with the title came to an end its flaws started to show, especially the difficulty in getting into an online lobby. However, anyone looking for a fun arcade football experience should definitely give Sociable Soccer 24 a try, especially if you have friends for local multiplayer where ultimately the game shines the brightest.
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