Table Football
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| Table Football

Ingrained in every true football fan's consciousness from an early age is the sad truth that the bad times far outweigh any fleeting opportunities of glimpsing the good.

When things are going badly, fans will get on the manager's, chairman's, board's back. They'll complain their star centre forward 'froze stiff' on the night, or lament the shocking defending of the back four because they were 'static'.

Well, what if your players were always static, and indeed frozen stiff? What if they were, in fact, grouped together in a 3-5-2 formation by a painful looking metal rod through their sides?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the cut-throat world of table football. Welcome to Digital Chocolate's Table Football. A mobile version of a physical pursuit is an interesting idea, but can the manic fun of the legendary indoor game be squeezed into your tiny mobile's innards?

Actually, it turns out that Table Football has some okay moves when it comes to those crunch derbys, but probably hasn't the stamina for the slog of a full season.

The game's a top-down affair, with the action scrolling sideways and your team always shooting from left to right. There's no time limit, half time or anything like that. You just have to score five goals before the opposition does the same.

After each game your statistics (such as wins and loses, goals scored, and goals against) are added onto your league table. You can then see where your stats place you on the rankings screen.

Once you've had a succession of victories, you get the chance to choose a new competitor from a spinning wheel that displays the available players and their teams, each with their own colour strips and names, such as Brute and The Cheater.

Kicking off, you soon find that the action is frantic and really gets the adrenaline pumping as you lose yourself in the spinning and shoving that's the cornerstone of any decent bout of table football. It's just like the real thing in fact, and praise should go to the developer for achieving it.

In truth though, to begin with you'll be punting the ball in the style of Wimbledon's early '90s Crazy Gang: hitting and hoping. But, just like in the real thing, as your skill level rises, you'll start to use your defence properly and playing the ball around in midfield with neat little flicks using 'down' on the directional pad.

The next task is to play the ball onto your forwards; then, with a quick interchange, sending a shot sailing towards goal only for it to rebound as you try to get the strikers in position to have another shot. We have to admit, it's fun.

In-game graphics are functional but, crucially, fast and very smooth, while the menu screens are well polished. The sound is weaker, however, with the music nondescript and effects (including a tune for scoring or conceding a goal) the only things that will trouble your phone's speaker.

The biggest problem though, is that once you've played a few games on the trot, Table Football begins to lose its appeal. Sure, the difficulty level increases and you'll witness the computer player showing off new ways of knocking the ball about, but there's just not enough here for the long run. To be honest, we'd expect some kind of traditional cup competition.

So it's certainly table football but unfortunately, after the initial high enjoyment factor, you realise Table Football is a couple of twists short of total football.

Table Football

This is a fun little game, but prolonged play exposes the truth that Table Football is a rather flat experience
Score
Chris Maddox
Chris Maddox
Liverpool fan, Chris, loves to watch the mighty Redmen play. In between matches however, he's an avid mobile games reviewer for Pocket Gamer. Chris has assured us that he only thinks about Liverpool FC a mere 80 per cent of the day.