FIFA 08

Nokia is so pleased to have FIFA 08 as an N-Gage launch title, it's giving 20,000 copies away free to encourage people to sign up.

It's a sensible decision on one level – FIFA is the biggest brand available so far on N-Gage – but there's a risk that if the game isn't great, people will get a negative impression of N-Gage.

Still, no need to worry: it's great, right? Er...

I'll get right to the point. FIFA 08 is a bit of a disappointment on N-Gage. It's got DS-style 3D visuals to separate it from a regular mobile game, but there are too many other frustrations to make it a classic.

But before we get to those, some facts. In true FIFA style, the game offers plenty of modes. You can set up an individual match involving international teams, or teams from a host of domestic leagues, including England, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, the USA, South Korea, Portugal and Mexico, as well as a grab-bag of teams from 'Rest Of World'.

There are also season and tournament modes – bizarrely there's no actual World Cup in the latter – and a series of challenges, such as taking control of Man Utd when they're 3-1 down to Blackburn with 35 minutes to go, and trying to win the game.

The controls have been kept fairly simple, with buttons assigned to pass, shoot, long pass, through ball, sprint and skill move when attacking. While in defence you have a choice of switching player, slide tackling or making the goalie charge out.

Actually, the controls are the first bugbear, especially if you want to take advantage of the (welcome) ability to play the game in landscape mode, with your phone turned sideways. The default controls have all these buttons set to the number pad, with movement assigned to the D-pad.

Yet if you're holding your phone sideways, both the buttons and the D-pad are on the left of the screen, so you end up holding it slightly awkwardly with both thumbs to the left. On my N81 8GB, I managed to reassign pass and shoot to the buttons on the right (i.e. above the screen, if you hold the phone normally). That helped.

The graphics themselves are pretty good, with a side-on viewpoint and a choice of cameras. The sound is a mixture of looped crowd-noise, and a kicking sound effect that sounds like someone dropping a ping-pong ball on a desk.

But the disappointment is in the action itself, which is just a bit too slow, a bit too fiddly and a bit too restricted to suit football fans' tastes. There are no one-twos, for example, while the crosses are really weedy (assuming the squitty pass into the box that happens when you press 'long pass' at the touchline is meant to be a cross).

You can have some fun with FIFA 08, but it's just not super enjoyable, and certainly doesn't meet your expectations if you've previously enjoyed the series on console (or, indeed, mobile). Players turn in the wrong direction when you don't intend them to, passes go to the wrong person... Too often, it just feels frustrating to play.

It's a hard criticism to explain, but the easiest illustration I can give is that I've got the Java versions of Pro Evolution Soccer, Real Football 2008, and indeed even FIFA 08 installed on my phone and the more I played N-Gage FIFA 08, the more appealing those Java games became.

For an £8 N-Gage download, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement (although not so bad if you can score a freebie).

Where the game does do better are the N-Gage connected elements, as you're assigned Career Points according to your total win record, goals for and against, and disciplinary record. This is then converted to an online ranking when you connect to N-Gage Arena.

You can also earn N-Gage Point Pickups; some for simple actions (scoring your first goal, keeping a clean sheet) and others for more complex tasks (scoring more than ten goals in a match, or winning a season). Pursuing these goals does provide a reason to play through the pain.

But the lingering feeling remains that FIFA 08 needs a gameplay injection to become the excellent flagship N-Gage game Nokia clearly wants it to be. Maybe next season?