UEFA Euro 2008 Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Who will you be supporting?

With England not having qualified for the Euros, there will be a lot of bored people this summer wondering who to support. Of course if your country has made it, then that's great, unless of course you support the Greeks. Just goes to show that lighting can't strike twice.

The disappointment of not qualifying has been reverberating around the UK for a while now, from the lack of cars driving around with England flags to JJB sports posting a loss due to all that unwanted stock. So I thought I would try and take some solace by playing the latest EA game, Euro 2008.

There are a few nice features to the game which I'll quickly skim over. Firstly you can play in landscape mode which isn't as bad as it sounds. Certainly having the larger screen size helps. Secondly you can play in either the finals of the tournament or go the whole qualifying route, thereby ensuring the Wally with the Brolley never got his chance to mess things up for England. And even in this mode you can skip the qualifying and take your team straight to the finals.

Then there are the graphics as the sprites and pitch are nice and detailed. Not enough, mind you, to be considered anywhere near the potential of a mobile footie game, but they're certainly not too bad. Sound is also catered for with funky tunes on loading and some bells, whistles and crowd noises.

The game has been designed to try and flow with effectively a one touch control system, press the main button or 5 to perform different moves such as passing, tackling, doing tricks and shooting. The player autoruns towards goal unless you change their direction, and you can control their directions using the stick or pad.

So onto the gripes then, and leading on from the simple one button control method is the first gripe. I found the direction the players autorun in quite hard to control. Any offensive player seemed to run towards goal and the occasional diagonal movement would result in them following suit. However defenders and certain midfielders seemed to run all over the place no matter what I was directing them to do. This could have been my overused stick on the K800i we tested it on, but even using the keypad it was slightly confusing. Especially when playing landscape.

The one button method works fine for some of the time but not all. For instance, whenever you have a little sign over your head you can pass or do a trick etc, but for each action, a mini meter appears over your head and you have to press the button in the green area. This is quite easy to do for tricks and slide tackles, but shooting becomes more annoying. You basically have to press it once to get the bar started and press it again in the right place. However, with the shooting icon not coming up automatically when near goal, I often forgot to do this and ended up hitting tame shots at the keeper.

After quite a bit of practice, I got the hang of it a bit more than before, but it was still quite fiddly. It meant that I could take it from defence, hit 2 lovely passes and then dribble around the whole team, only for a really lame shot ending up nowhere near the goal. After more practice, I became a little bit more accustomed to shooting and ended up belting them in from almost the halfway line.

Yep, the difficulty options at first seem overly hard (amateur still had me losing by a reasonable margin) but then after a while they get too easy. It isn't really pitched right. And tackling often became a nightmare due to the fact that the sprites move pretty slowly. There's no zip or fluidity about the game, it often looks as if your players are running the hurdles instead of dribbling with a ball.

The game does have management and strategy going for it. All the squads are there, except for the strange country of Holland who seem to deny all requests to license their players. So, with a bit of letter rearranging you do get the proper Dutch squad. Formation and strategy is there too, but only on the level we have come to expect from mobile footie games, i.e. you can't do the awareness just yet.

For the non football fans amongst you, you can even turn the offside option off to play with a bit more openess and the game will autosave your progress in between matches. It even has decent replays to view, but you can't save them. Anyway, maybe I'm being a bit overly critical on what is essentially a fun game, but with all the things mentioned above being a little bit below par, the whole experience feels like it could have and should have been better.