Tiki Taka Soccer scores with both fans and foes of the beautiful game

Each week, we send out early codes of selected games to members of our App Army and ask for their feedback. One top pick this week was PanicBarn's one-finger football wonder Tiki Taka Soccer.

Let's see what our App Army had to say...

Conor: Tiki Taka Soccer is not really my cup of tea as I don't really enjoy playing soccer games. However, the controls are seamless and it feels well built. I can imagine it being a perfect for any soccer fan. I also really like how you can upgrade the skills of each player on your team. Kainen: Wow. There's certainly a level of skill to this game. It's not too bad so far! Quincy: I've played many soccer games as I'm from the West Indies. The last one I truly enjoyed playing was World Cup Soccer on the NES made by the same team as River City Ransom (one of the best brawlers ever)! Kainen: I hate soccer, but loved New Star Soccer and Sensible Soccer. Sensi was the best - the original, not not remake. I liked some of the manager ones as well. I enjoy the more cerebral soccer games. Tyler: I fell in love with Tiki Taka Soccer after playing it for just five minutes. I'd have to say that Tiki Taka Soccer is now my new favourite soccer game on the App Store! Clint: Well this is a little gem of a game. Just started playing and am amazed at the amount of detail they have crammed in. Everything from end of match stats to crowd numbers, and much, much more.

You also earn money and experience during each match, which you can then use to buy players, staff, and energy refills. So far though, this is pretty good fun even though I'm not a huge football fan!

Edward: This is a great game for anyone really - football fan or not. The touch controls during each match are simple and easy to pick up, which means you can get into it right away.

The general gameplay is smooth and well thought out, with each match taking 7-8 minutes to complete at most. At the end of each match, you will get a variety of stats to help you decide where you need to improve your team.

The management side of the game is intriguing. It allows you to control various aspects of the team, such as buying players, managing coach effectiveness, and buying an accountant to increase the income of your team.

The game is intuitive; a nice 15 minute coffee break game that'll keep me entertained for a while.

Tyler: Just going to post my awesome half field shot! Clint: That is so cool Tyler - good goal as well!

Tyler: Thanks! Kainen: I won a match 2-0. Go me. Edward: It's cool that you can share your goals.

Clint: Just figured out that the recording function is built into the game - how cool is that? This is a great game, really good fun. Tyler: Nice job Clint! I'm having so much fun with this game. Newmanator: This game looks fantastic. I guess free to play can be good!

Tyler: Warning: this is a lot of fun! Muhammad: I'm finding the gameplay slightly slow. The gesture controls are simple, but I often find myself swiping instead of pressing every now and then. The players are really small, making it kind of hard to tell which team is which.

It's hard to tell if there's a penalty sometimes, so I just stand there and wonder why the players are frozen. All things aside, the controls aren't that hard to learn, the characters are funny, and the game is a great time waster.

Clint: There are some lovely touches in this game, like how players get injured if you misread a tackle and go in too hard. That means they are not as effective in the game, so you need to substitute them out for fresh players. The player animations and celebrations when goals are scored are pretty funny too.

I'm starting to find it's getting harder to win matches now. I just can't seem to run as fast as the opposition, and as I am losing every match I'm not making much money so can't buy the boosts.

All I can do at this point is spend real money. The IAPs are not the worst I've seen (ranging from 79p to £30), but I begrudge spending money as it feels I have no choice. Well... I could just keep on losing I guess!

Kainen: There are also ads you can watch to build up your money. Clint: Yeah, I know... but they only give you 465 credits and a single 20 match buffer for speed and stamina is about 15,000. I've been wasting my cash on those, so I have nothing left to buy better players with. I hate watching ads too.
Kainen: Ah, I see what you mean. I'll be hitting that point soon enough. It's not a fair F2P model then? Clint: Hah... don't get me started on F2P. In Tiki Taka Soccer you can buy 100,000 credits for 79p as a starter pack all the way up to 50 million credits for £29.99. The problem I have with all these schemes is that the top-tier option is much better value for money.

If you work the total cost of buying 50 million credits in 100k increments at 79p a time comes to £395! My gripe with it all is that for £29.99 I can almost buy a AAA title for my PlayStation 4 / Xbox One and play it for as long as I want, whenever I want.

Kainen: I'll preface this by saying I'm not a fan of soccer, and I don't like most soccer games.

The controls in Tiki Taka Soccer could be a little more responsive, but they do the job - you tap to move and swipe to score. Outside of the matches there are also very light management aspects.

This all works well, but then you hit the F2P wall where you are practically forced to pay to progress further. Although there are other ways to gain this money for free, it would mean grinding for hours on end to do so.

Tiki Taka Soccer is fun, but it's a shame about the grind.

Aaron: I was quite excited about this game, but I'm struggling to get into it. Hopefully it'll grow on me! Clint: I've played 15 more matches, and I'm finding a few little cracks in the controls. I sometimes find that tapping to select someone to tackle can turns into an accidental swipe, meaning the ball goes flying off in the wrong direction.

As the players are really small, your hand can get in the way sometimes. You can't always see where players are passing the ball to. I'm also finding that every now and that it doesn't matter how many times I tap on a player to tackle them, nothing happens. A bit frustrating...

Ryan: Being a huge football fan, I'm digging this game so far. I like how it's set up almost like a career mode where you can lead your team to success.

The control scheme is the one complaint I have though. It's good in the sense that you can control a lot of aspects of the game by just tapping the screen, but it can get annoying when you try to dribble as you can accidentally tap a teammate and pass it unintentionally.

Overall though it's a fun game for football fans, or people just looking for a nice play.

Brad: I'm not a big sports guy, real or otherwise. That being said, I've thoroughly enjoyed Tiki Taka Soccer.

While the deep team energy and injury management is still a little too involved for my taste, the gameplay is a great example of how touch-screen games ought to be presented: intuitive controls, quick matches, light setup, and an easy to understand upgrade system. I even had a great time hunting around for the best team accountant between matches.

Considering how much I've enjoyed Tiki Taka Soccer in spite of my prejudices, I can only imagine how much more fun this game will be for anyone who is actually a fan.

Sohail: Tika Taka Soccer is almost everything a football game fan could ask for from an iOS game.

I like the simple controls that allow you to get to grips with the game right away. The fact that you can hire staff to help boost earnings, skills, choose formations and much more adds more of a strategic element too.

I am indifferent to the fact that the game offers IAPs to help you progress faster or grind your way to the top since this has become the norm with mobile games these days.

Improvements I would like to see are the addition of a sprint button, placing the menu buttons on the corners of the screen, a more colourful palette for the stadiums, licensed content, louder crowd cheers, and bigger player models with rings round their feet so you have a nice little circle to tap.

Overall, Tiki Taka Soccer is a great game which could become an essential on the App Store.

Aaron: Initially I was unimpressed by Tika Taka Soccer, but I've been giving it some more time and it's starting to grow on me. The game doesn't really explain very much, so I'm still trying to figure out some of the symbols.

The game plays fairly well, although the players act a little strangely at times. I really like the style of the game - it reminds me of C64 soccer games. The IAPs aren't too in your face either.

You basically have to buy coaches and so on to stand any chance of winning though. I love the depth of the game: simulated league matches, player stats, and so on. Hopefully I'll get more into the game the more I play it.

Sjoerd: Why play FIFA when you can play Tiki Taka Soccer? This game works perfectly on mobile, thanks to the easy-to-use one finger controls. Fast gameplay, cool characters and a great use of ads and IAPs.

The only part where the ads show up is when you want free money, so you can choose if you prefer to watch ads or not.

Sadly there are some annoyances: a useless language button that doesn't work, and the swipe-to-shoot controls aren't always accurate either.

However, with all the pixel games hitting the App Store each week, Tiki Taka Soccer definitely one that stands out.

Aaron: It eventually gets super hard to win any matches. I found I just had to keep buying the energy drink cans for half-time boosts and taking on some coaches to get the speed up. Also, my players really suck at passing. Seriously. curtneedsaride: Tiki Taka Soccer doesn't strive for FIFA-like realism or FMH2015-like simulation, but falls somewhere in between.

The sim part of the game feels good and not too deep, but doesn't allow for a hands-off management gameplay style. The gameplay was fun in the pre-season matches when I could choose the my opponents, but once the season started the difficulty ramped up.

The yellow cards were thrown here and there for almost every tackle, and the passes didn't always go directly to the player I tapped. Overall, though, the touch controls are a brilliant idea and work for this game.

The IAPs are all over this app. You can use in-game currency for most things, but it takes time to earn that. Otherwise, you can spend a lot of real money climbing your way to the top of the league. You know, like in real football!

Tiki Taka Soccer has oodles of charm. If this was a premium app, it would stay on my phone for a while. As long as you don't mind the standard F2P trappings, then this might be a fun footie sim for you.

The App Army have spoken! If you'd like to sign up, please have a gander at our App Army application article. Did you pick up Tiki Taka Soccer? What do you think of it? Let us know in the comments below!