Game Reviews

It seems that crafting a street soccer game is significantly harder than it appears. Throughout the years, gamers have been treated to plenty of attempts to capture the beautiful game as it’s played all over the world (read: the way basketball is played Stateside). Most of them have ended in failure, or at best, a passable diversion you picked up after a price drop (FIFA Street 3, Mario Strikers Charged). Add Ubisoft Vancouver’s Pure Futbol to the former, not the latter. Amidst a month of footy fever, it’s a cash-in designed to nab the casual soccer fan. Don’t be fooled by its wiles.Pure Futbol’s arcade-style approach to 5-on-5 soccer is cut from a similar cloth as FIFA Street. It features cartoonish versions of real-life players from several national teams, including powerhouses such as Brazil, Spain, and England as well as non-World Cup heavy hitters like Croatia and Turkey. However, there are conspicuously missing big names like Drogba and Sneijder. They’ll play in rather ordinary recreations of different European locales, like a Milanese factory, a Madrid bullfighting ring, and a Marseilles port.Gameplay follows a similar standard seen in other streetball games. You accumulate Pure Points by pulling off stylish flourishes -- on-the-ball trickery or hitting the sweet spot for a goal shot. Most of the gameplay is dependent upon a pop-up meter (similar to Mario Strikers Charged) that indicates the accuracy of your shooting, aerial passing, and through ball passes. If you can hit the flashing white pure spot on the meter (red, of course, means a bad move and green is accurate), you’re more likely to set up a big play. Pure Futbol takes a different tack for defense. You defend by tapping one of the shoulder triggers a la FIFA 10, and slide tackles are counted on a foul meter. No matter where you are on the field, a few mistimed sliding tackles will give your opponent a penalty kick.You take those skills to the next level in campaign, in which you take a created player and user-generated club to take on the world’s finest. As you hit certain requirements in each match (score two Pure goals, prevent the opponent from taking more than six shots on goal), you’ll unlock more recruitable players from each nation and build up your Pure Point tally. Eventually, you can sell your players online for a ridiculously high amount of Pure Points.