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2018 World Football League review - A decent game blighted by adverts

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2018 World Football League review - A decent game blighted by adverts

2018 World Football League is very much a game of two halves. On the one hand, it's a really interesting game that plays a little bit like Subbuteo.

On the other though, if it plays me another advert while I'm playing it for this review I swear to the footballing gods I'm going to hurl my phone out of the window and sue the developer to get me a new one.

Flip it

So, let's start with the good stuff. The game is basically played with bottle caps. You twang them around the screen using catapult-style controls, and your aim is to score more goals than your opponent.

There's a time limit here, but the game is also turn-based. One team has a flick, then it's the next team's turn. It's a neat idea, and while it misses out a lot of the tactical nuances of football, it also makes everything flow pretty well.

You can mash into the opposing team to make them score own goals, or bounce the ball off the sides of the pitch and into the net. There's experimentation to do here, and you're going to enjoy doing it.

2018 World Football League iOS review screenshot - England vs Tunisia

Or rather, you would enjoy doing it if the game wasn't constantly halting your progress with incessant video ads. If you play for three minutes without seeing one, you feel like you've somehow levelled up.

It's a massive shame, but it's so annoying that it really does serve as a massive black mark against the game's name. It is, without a doubt, one of the worst implementations of video monetisation I've ever seen.

It's made worse by the fact that the actual game is a lot of fun. But when the app is so set against you actually getting a chance to enjoy any of that game, it's not going to be long before you abandon it for something else.

Off the hoardings

There's a lack of polish here as well that would keep the game from scoring well even if it didn't insist on throwing a broken advert at you every time you did anything.

2018 World Football League could have been pretty damn good. As it stands right now the only reason anyone will mention it in the future will be in a talk about how not to do mobile ads.

World cup prediction: England will (buy our stuff) get knocked out in (play this game) the quarter finals by (or this game) Switzerland (ADVERTS).

2018 World Football League review - A decent game blighted by adverts

There's a good game somewhere here, but there are so many adverts to watch in order to get to it, it's really not worth the hassle
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.