Arc Style: Soccer 3D

Genre: Sports (Soccer)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Alternating)

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Review:

Arc Style: Soccer 3D, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2012, is a family-friendly Soccer game with a simple presentation with characters designed to look somewhat like Nintendo’s Mii character designs.

The presentation in this game is pretty abysmal, using extremely simple, low-detail 3D visuals for its players, field, and stands, with some generic-sounding “sports” music thrown in for good measure. What’s more, this game advertises players bringing their own faces into the game, but this feature is extremely unimpressive, not only slapping a flat still image on the player, but restricting it to only a portion of their face, making it almost look like the player is wearing a skin-colored space helmet or something. Very odd.

This game features no options or control menus, and no features beyond a team edit mode, exhibition matches, and tournaments. At no point does the game indicate how its controls work, and you just have to kinda’ figure it out.

However, this is not the problem you would think it would be. To explain why, let me paint a picture for you. Please, indulge me for a moment while I go off on a bit of a tangent:

There is a great soccer/martial arts film called Shaolin Soccer, where a beleaguered soccer coach meets a kung fu enthusiast and the pair gather together a team of kung fu masters to form a soccer team, with the twin goals of advertising the virtues of kung fu and winning the big soccer tournament. After some initial difficulties, the team finally competes in their first official match with a professional team.

The result is absolute lunacy – the kung fu team uses their absurd “super saiyan” skills (or something like that) to absolutely steamroll over the opposing team, who are presumably competent at the sport but not endowed with kung fu superpowers. The opposing team can do little but watch, dumbstruck, as the kung fu team effortlessly scores goal after goal after goal with little effort.

Playing Arc Style: Soccer 3D made me feel like I was reliving this film scene, absolutely demolishing my computer-controlled opponent, who was powerless to stop me. I do not say this as a compliment – the AI in this game is an absolute joke, falling for it time and again as I immediately steal the ball from their player when they come into possession and taking shot after shot on their goal until one gets in, with them completely failing to try to steal the ball back from me.

I suppose you might get more competition in multiplayer, but I don’t really see the point. This is a pretty shallow and not especially well-crafted Soccer game, and I don’t know why you would subject a friend to that, especially with other better options available.

In short, Arc Style: Soccer 3D is ugly, simple, lacking features and options, and the enemy AI is absurdly incompetent. I cannot possibly recommend this game to anyone.

tl;dr – Arc Style: Soccer 3D is a family-friendly Soccer game with ugly graphics, terribly lacking features and options, shallow gameplay, and laughably terrible AI. With virtually zero redeeming features, I cannot think of any reason why you would bother with this game.

Grade: D

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