Real Football 2007 (2D)

If you ask us, mobile publishers are on the wrong track when it comes to football realism. Forget through passes and one-twos: where's the spitting, swearing and drunken golf-club bust-ups? We guess we'll have to wait for Craig Bellamy's Team Bonding 2007.

Gameloft has always focused on the nobler elements of the beautiful game for its Real Football series. Full 11-a-side matches and a host of actions going beyond basic passing and shooting, all wrapped up in a glitzy presentation, it's historically outperformed its main rival, EA Mobile's FIFA series.

With the recently-released FIFA 07, however, EA changed course, stripping down the controls to produce something much more accessible and mobile-friendly, which we celebrated in our review. In contrast, with Real Football 2007 Gameloft has stuck to its guns, trying to balance more complex controls with pure mobile playability.

For the first time then, there's a clear difference between Real Football and FIFA. So which is best? We'll get to that in a bit.

We'll start with licensing issues. Real Football 2007 has a FIFPRO licence, which means all the player names are real, but it doesn't have the competition or team names – so that teams not named after a city have been changed for trademark reasons (for example, Arsenal become 'London'). Competition-wise, you can play friendlies, three cup competitions (where the World Cup becomes 'The International Cup'), and in three leagues (for example, the 'Euro Club Cup'), as well as practising your penalties and doing a spot of training.

The fake team names grate a little compared to FIFA 07's full set of licences, but football game fans will be used to this sort of thing.

On the pitch, Real Football 2007 remains a class act, albeit one that takes time to truly master. All the basics are in there, such as short and long passes, shots, crosses and headers. You use pretty much every key on the keypad, with the numeric keys taking care of eight-way movement, while pressing '5' passes, 'hash' makes a long pass or cross, and '0' shoots, using a little bar at the bottom of the screen to aim.

Then there's the more advanced controls, like lobbing the goalkeeper by pressing '*' followed by '0', or using the '*' key to perform tricks like the flip-flap or the Marseilles Roulette (that thing Zidane used to do where he span around while dribbling the ball). You can also do one-twos by pressing '5' twice when passing.

Matches can last from three to 20 minutes, with difficulty levels from Junior to Legend. You can tweak your formation, change your attacking level, and rotate your team at will, before getting into the matches proper. It's a good level of strategy for a mobile game.

The matches themselves are very slickly presented, with replays and slices of text commentary. We'd say though that the N70 version of FIFA 07 looks better than this N70 version of Real Football 2007, and has a plethora of camera angles to choose from, compared to the Gameloft game's single isometric viewpoint.

However, Gameloft will be releasing a full 3D version of Real Football, which should come out alongside this 2D version – so that'll be the best direct comparison with FIFA 07 on the N70. In the meantime, this 2D version has a lot of nice graphical touches, from the weather effects to the way players shimmy as they perform a trick.

So, the crunch: which is the better game? We're afraid we're going to have to sit on the fence!

Real Football 2007 plays a more absorbing game of footy than FIFA 07, especially once you get the hang of the through-balls and one-twos, which open up the game against the tougher difficulty levels.

On the downside though, the shonky competition and team names will put some players off. More importantly, the controls are fiddlier than FIFA 07's, particularly as you have to keep pressing a directional button to keep your player moving, rather than merely change his direction as you do in FIFA 07.

Indeed, Real Football is one game where you really do have to play through the tutorials first to get to grips with mastering the gameplay. It's much more complex than FIFA 07's control system – a plus point or a minus, depending on how nerdy you are about your football games. More casual players will prefer FIFA's controls, while hardened Pro Evolution Soccer nuts will gravitate towards Real Football. It's horses for courses, as Ruud van Nistelrooy might neigh.

If you want a great-looking casual football fix then, go for FIFA 07. If you've got a bit more time to invest and want more gameplay depth, plump for Real Football 2007.

Or, seeing as this is mobile and games cost less than a fiver, buy both and revel in their different approaches. They're both Premiership performers, after all. On mobile, you don't HAVE to pledge allegiance to one or the other.