Urban Freestyle

The honours for achieving sporting thrills through frantic button-pressing may well belong to David Beckham (with an assist from Ms Loos), but at first glance Acclaim’s latest offers a worthy challenge. Mixing football skills with the sort of key combinations more suited to a fighting game, Urban Freestyle demands a combination of timing and quick thinking which could well be beyond the England captain these days. Players take control of a 2D footballing ball-juggler and must type out combos of up to 3 keys in between kick-ups in order to pull off increasingly outlandish moves. As only certain combos perform movements, you’re forced to strike a balance between the safety of mundane single button heels, kicks and headers which will keep the ball airborne and gambling on something more exotic and higher-scoring at the risk losing the ball. Add in some bonuses thrown in for successful combos or perfect timing and a tidy graphical approach and you’ve got a solid game mechanic that works well with virtually all phone hardware but still offers a fun challenge. Indeed for your first few games there’s a real thrill in discovering new moves and putting together combos. However, much like the relationships of a certain soccer player, the novelty wears off quite rapidly and the absence of any real stimulation (why doesn’t the challenge mode offer CPU opposition) renders Urban Freestyle suitable for only the shortest of away trips.