Penalty World Cup

One aspect of football that can get pretty much anyone excited – even the most aloof spectator – is the penalty shootout. You don't have to know the rules or regulations of the pitch to understand the tension of goal tender versus kicker.

In Penalty World Cup, all the drama has been boiled down to a series of penalty shots between 32 different teams from across the globe. The athletic fireworks end there, sadly, as this pretty-looking game doesn't score much beyond its graphics.

A slick introduction leads the way to equally splashy menus allowing you to select a team based on a range of statistics. These don't have much of an effect on the gameplay and, even if they did, they would be self-defeating. You're not exactly going to pick teams with the worst abilities, so after cycling through the 32 teams once, you're likely to have chosen your players from that point on.

World Cup mode has you working your way through the big tournament, whereas Quick Game sets you in a shorter one-off match. Turns are taken taking penalty shots and defending the goal. Figuring out how to do that, exactly, is the problem.

The instructions are pretty feeble, at best; tucked away behind a small question mark. You begin your penalty kick by drawing a sweeping gesture from the ball to the goal in order to denote your shot. At the bottom right is a football allowing you to add a bit of spin to the shot, which is reflected in the directional arrow previously drawn into the goal mouth.

As soon as the direction of your shot has been set, however, a countdown timer begins in the bottom left of the screen. Pressing it as close as possible to the end determines the power of your kick. Hit it too early or too late and the ball will trickle rather than cannon into the net.

There's no real sensation of power, unfortunately. Even worse, an accidental touch of the screen can muck up your entire shot since you have no way to alter the ball's trajectory once it has been assigned.

Tending the goal is equally as inflexible. Before the kicker has even set off running, you must allocate where your goalie will jump to, then tap that position again as the ball comes in. It's difficult to discern the best possible position, even though the game will suggest whether you've made a good or bad decision; however, you often block or miss the ball regardless.

On top of this, your goalie regularly does nothing except fall straight backwards. This is pretty annoying, unless the shooter happens, quite by chance, to be kicking the ball at your nuts. Which they do.

A two-player pass-the-handset option is also included, but the already stilted gameplay suffers quite badly due to the unavoidable delay between the kick and the attempted block. You are rewarded, slightly, by an extended view of the shot once both moves have been made.

It says a lot that the cinematic of the shot possesses more appeal than the act of taking it. Presentation is a big part of Penalty World Cup and there's no denying it looks splendid. The game's arbitrary control scheme, however, makes it quite difficult to cheer for it, stripping it of much of the dynamism and excitement of a real penalty shootout.