World Class Champion Soccer

Genre: Arcade / Sports (Soccer)

Players: 1

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Review:

World Class Champion Soccer, released on Nintendo Switch in 2022, is a Soccer…-themed pairing of Arcade-style games, “Free Kick Game” and “Dribble Game”, with each of these games being further divided into a one-player single mode and a Vs mode… that is also single-player, though the game does try to make it seem like you might be playing against other players online, even making you wait for these fictional players to “join” your game. Ugh.

Before going on, I should make it absolutely clear that this is a touchscreen-only game – you cannot play this game docked, or in Tabletop mode with a controller.

To its credit, the “Free Kick Game” does actually make use of the touchscreen pretty well, having players draw the path they want to kick the ball on-screen, aiming to get their shot past the goalie and into the goal, possibly even scoring extra points by hitting a target. Unfortunately, your shots often don’t seem to follow the path you direct them to go very well, forcing the player to kinda’ guess how to draw the path to actually make the ball go where they want it. Yeah, not great.

As for “Dribble Game”, this has you tapping the screen to direct a moving ball to go either left or right to avoid obstacles, something that could have been much better done with a gamepad controller, but unfortunately this game doesn’t want you doing that. Oh, and after each section of course, you play a brief version of the “Free Kick Game” to continue to the next level. This means that if you want to avoid that minigame, there’s no such luck here, unless you play the Vs. mode version, which seems to be an endless variant.

The presentation in this game is absolutely ugly, with a soccer field and players using extremely outdated 3D character models, joined only by the sound of ball kicks and the stadium fans’ cheering, with a repetitive riff of synthesized stadium music playing in menus along with indistinct commentator chatter. All of these sounds work well enough, but it’s hard to care when the game looks this ugly.

In the end… I mean, come on. This is a minigame collection with only two minigames, neither of them good. It forces you to play in handheld mode, and makes you put up with it pretending like you’re playing in multiplayer when the game doesn’t support multiplayer at all. Add to this an insulting $11 price tag (surely to make the regular discounts to $2 seem like a good deal), and you have a game that feels like both a foul and a flop. Give it the red card and usher it off the field.

tl;dr – World Class Champion Soccer is a pair of Soccer-themed Arcade-style minigames that forces you to play the game using a touchscreen. The visuals are ugly, neither of the games are good, and the game forces you to wait for other players to join even though it’s entirely a single-player game. Do not buy this deflated joke of a game.

Grade: D

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