Tipp Kick

I invented a game the other day. You sit at one side of a table and your opponent sits at the other. You take a plastic identity card (or, if you want to hazard the unpredictability of a ridged surface, a bank card) and rest it on the edge of the table so that one side overhangs. Then, using the flat of your hand, you try to knock the card across the table so that it ends up overhanging the edge on your opponent's side.

Sound familiar? I've called it 'Card'. It's awesome.

HandyGames has invented a game, too. The object of Tipp Kick is to get a ball into your opponent's goal more times than he gets it into yours. The game takes place on a rectangular pitch with a goal at each end and markings to indicate the outer boundary, the halfway line, and the goal's penalty area.

If that also sounds familiar, it's important to bear in mind that – just as Card is emphatically not just two idiots procrastinating in a canteen – Tipp Kick is not a football game.

You begin at the centre of a pitch, faced by a single opponent. Between you is a ball with one black hemisphere and the other white. If the white side is facing upwards – which, at the kick off, it always is – you get to kick it. If it subsequently lands white side up, you get to kick it again. If not, your opponent gets a go. And that's the game.

Well, more or less. HandyGames has also included a pass-and-play two-player mode and two game modes – Amateur and Professional – as well as a records system, so that you can relive your greatest triumphs through the medium of statistics.

In Professional mode, there are four stages to each move: selecting a kicker, choosing the direction, determining the trajectory, and judging the force. Some kickers can kick far but without accuracy, while others can thread the ball through the eye of a potato, but only if it's less than five yards away.

While the choice of kickers is there to add depth to the gameplay, there's no real art to making the right selection, and so exercising this choice often feels more like a chore rather than the stimulating tactical challenge it's meant to be.

The same is true of all of the adjustable settings. Since you'll always hit it long and high from the centre of the pitch, and since you'll always hit it low and hard towards the goal, there's little sense in HandyGames making you do the adjustments. It's nice for a game to give you choices, but Tipp Kick simply doesn't have enough going on in its simple universe to support more than a single approach.

Amateur mode is admirably different. Here, the direction and power meters automatically pump up and down or wash back and forth so that you're left to carefully time your button-presses. While Professional is an easygoing, sedentary experience in which you can approach each shot at your own pace, Amateur demands a bit more skill. Oddly, it's in fact the harder of the two modes.

The game's presentation is unambitious but perfectly respectable. The character on the loading screen says it all: although his leg looks as though it has been made from chickenwire and glued to his hip, he's wearing a big smile and, for all we know, scoring a goal.

For a basic title, Tipp Kick also boasts some banging sounds, including the classic stadium roar and a jet engine thunderclap effect that accompanies – perhaps over-zealously – every kick over five feet.

Ultimately, the minimalism of the gameplay works in its favour as a casual title, but we think it could have been a little more involved without losing any of its simplistic appeal. It would be nice, for instance, to have the option to put curl on the ball, or the necessity to take wind conditions into consideration when lining up a kick.

In the end, the combination of rudimentary play and utter chance works pretty well. Tipp Kick is no masterpiece, but like our own Card it has a way of gripping your arm and coercing you into playing just one more shot – last one, promise – before doing something more worthwhile.