Game Reviews

Turbo Soccer review - A simple kicker without much bite

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| Turbo Soccer
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Turbo Soccer review - A simple kicker without much bite
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| Turbo Soccer

There are many, many different types of football game on mobile. There are ones that focus on strategy, ones that focus on you plying your players with energy drinks, and ones that attempt to capture some of the magic of the home console classics.

Then there are games like Turbo Soccer, that take the so-called beautiful game and slice it up into little bite-sized chunks. They're never going to set the world on fire, but if they do what they do well, they're decent distractions.

Here the end result is solid, if not remarkable. There are some good ideas, but in the end it's a distinct lack of variety that does for Turbo Soccer.

Kick it

The game sees you controlling a single player, who always seems to be in on goal. As you peg-it towards the opponent's penalty area, you need to perform little QTEs in order to take the ball past other players and speed up your run. At the end, you swipe on the screen to score.

Get the QTEs spot on and score the goal, you'll get more points. Get them wrong and you'll be less well rewarded when the level comes to an end. At least in one of the modes you will. There are two others here to sink your teeth into.

First you've got striker mode, which is all about scoring goals. Each challenge you just swipe the screen and see if you can score. There are online leaderboards here that show you how well you're doing.

Turbo Soccer iOS review screenshot - Riding a tackle

The other mode is a tournament. Here you've got an energy bar. Hit your QTEs right and you won't lose any energy, hit them wrong and you will. You'll get chances to score, but you won't be able to retry if you miss.

Once your energy has run out, the other team will score, and you'll be entirely unable to stop it. After a set amount of time, whichever team has the most goals, moves on to the next round.

And that's about it. You'll play for a while, and you'll realise that there's not much else on offer. The challenges remain the same, there's a limited number of runs you can perform, and sometimes you'll fall down and your opponents will score.

Just done it

It'd be nice to have something else going on, like a defensive mode, or some way of changing up the skills of your kick ball man. But you don't get any of that.

Turbo Soccer is simple, and once you've had your way with it, you're going to put it down and find something else to do. For that hour or so you're going to enjoy it, but there's not enough to keep you playing longer than that.

World cup prediction: England will get knocked out in the last 16. Because they fall over.

Turbo Soccer review - A simple kicker without much bite

There's some pretty good ideas here, but it doesn't manage to quite live up to all of them
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.