Naked Babe Soccer

So dedicated were the Crewe women's under-25 football team that when, after many missed evenings and weekends given up to the noble sport, their funding fell through just the evening before the vital sixth league playoff match, leaving them with no uniform to wear, they strode on the pitch naked, ready to score a goal for women's solidarity. After that fateful day, the Crewe women's under-25 team was regarded alongside the suffragettes as a positive icon of female empowerment.

If only Naked Babe Soccer had such a diverting justification. No, there are no such deeper meanings here, and links to the sport in question are fairly arbitrary too. We'd guess that the girls featured in the four mini-games are all meant to be under 25, though.

These four games are based on either penalties or abstract ball skills, so those expecting a team's worth of bouncing, ill-supported flesh onscreen should look elsewhere. The visuals are grounded in a manga style, with the girls painted in bold block colour rather than photorealistic strokes. The result is reasonably attractive for a low-budget adult game, although animations are poor, featuring few enough frames to seem more like a slide show than movement.

The first two games cast you as the goalkeeper and penalty-taker in a game of penalties. When you're shooting, you merely need to select a direction with either the '2', '4' or '6' keys and then hit '5' when the moving gauge is within a safe 'green zone' to score. Similarly, saving a goal as the keeper just requires you to hit either '2', '4' or '6' within a certain time following an onscreen prompt suggesting where the ball is going to be shot.

Following these are 'Headers' and 'Keep it Up'. The former, much like the goalkeeper's penalty duties, sees you hitting keys as per an onscreen prompt. Meanwhile, the latter is a little different, where you have to direct your tragically under-dressed player left and right so that the ball is under some relevant body part that can hit the ball up into the air upon pressing '5', whether that's her knee or head.

However, the controls simply aren't responsive enough for this game to work particularly well, and once the ball starts veering off, it's likely to end up on the floor no matter how quick you think your fingers are.

There are two main modes – Training and Championship –but really the second of these is merely the games in an order, where training lets you play whichever game whenever you fancy. The lack of any more involved structure makes the whole experience seem distinctly pointless, especially when you can master each of the games within a few minutes (apart from the endlessly tricky 'Keep It Up', of course).

It's good to see a game that dares to stray from the traditional format of the adult title. Naked Babe Soccer is not just a casual/retro game that unlocks some adult photos. However, this only really amplifies the disappointment felt when the game turns out to be a duffer. With so-so visuals, clumsy controls and gameplay that you can largely master within a single play session, Naked Babe Soccer fails to score.