Toon Cup

Professional football players are painted as pretty unreal characters. These are the chaps who can not only perform superhuman wonders with a sack of air, but make some thoroughly baffling decisions in their day to day lives to boot.

Such as fritter away their millions on hideous mock-Tudor houses, or moan about their lot in life despite getting paid a fortune for two hours ‘work’ per day. These aren’t human beings – they’re cartoon characters.

It’s not such a huge shock, then, to boot up Toon Cup and discover that you’re playing with a bunch of super-deformed toons.

But perhaps that’s just because they all look like Wayne Rooney.

This is a top-down five-a-side footy game, but instead of Messi and co. each of the teams is populated by said toons and captained by a popular character from the Cartoon Network (who also doubles as the ‘keeper). You could line up against Buttercup from the Powerpuff Girls, for instance, or take to the field as Ben from Ben 10.

Each character (apart from Ben) imbues his team with a signature ability, such as telekinesis or a magic stun, which grants a unique advantage. But it’s the general play that warrants the most attention here.

Toon Cup calls to mind some classic footy games from the 1990s, particularly the seminal Sensible Soccer (try saying that ten times fast), in the way it ditches realism for a fast paced, action heavy kick around.

All you’ll need is the D-pad to move your players and the ‘5’ key to handle everything else - passes, chips, and shots are all activated contextually. This works well for the most part, allowing you to concentrate on the match rather than where your thumb is, although the game doesn’t always pick the move you were intending (a square pass instead of a chipped shot from the edge of the area, for example).

Still, the action has such a sense of knockabout fun that you’ll forgive many of these flaws. The addition of outlandish power-ups threatens to unbalance the whole game – particularly the time-stopper, which literally lets you dribble past a static defence and walk the ball into the net – but on the whole they provide an injection of unpredictable fun.

There is the lingering sense that the game has been rushed out somewhat to meet the current demand for all things football shaped. The main Toon Cup mode, for example, stretches things a little thin by requiring you to play each team four times in a row before you can progress and unlock the next team.

We’ve already discussed the occasionally unbalanced power-ups, but another element that suggests a lack of play testing is a particular type of unassisted shot that will guarantee you a goal every time you execute it (provided the contextual controls don’t fail you at the vital moment).

Still, it’s a testament to GlobalFun’s work on the core of the game that none of these imbalances and deficiencies can derail the game completely. Toon Cup is a solid alternative pick for a mobile footy game this World Cup season.