Soccer Tactics

Just like most sports, soccer requires certain tactics as well, not just athletic skills and talent. In addition, soccer is a team sport, which means that the players must work together in order to score goals. The manager also has a very important job, since it’s his duty to pick the best strategy and study the opposing team’s tactics before a match.

Turn-based soccer with arcade mechanics

Soccer Tactics is a simple sports with turn-based gameplay mechanics and simple gameplay, in which you have to think ahead and win matches by having the best strategy. Unfortunately, the actual mechanics are very rough and repetitive, not to mention imprecise. Thus, the experience becomes frustrating after only a few minutes, mainly because you can never perform accurate shots.
Even if everything takes place in turns, you have a very short time window to make your moves, otherwise the game punishes you by skipping your turn. In short, you have to point the desired player in the ball’s direction and adjust the power of the shot. There are no other mechanics to take advantage of, so you learn all you need to know in the first seconds of gameplay.

Extremely annoying foul system

One of the things you have to keep in mind is that it’s considered a foul if you hit an opponent before you touch the ball. It doesn’t matter how light the touch is, and you also lose two turns in the process. Since you cannot actively defend yourself when this happens, not to mention the fact that it’s very easy to cause a foul, the AI almost always has an advantage over you.
Lastly, the graphics are very simple as well, although they do not really matter in the grand scheme of things. It’s obviously a bit of a bummer that the stadium never changes and you are always looking at the same thing, but at least the shirts change color if you pick a different team. The music gets annoying and repetitive after a while as well, but it can be easily turned off.

A nice idea that needs some fixes

In the end, Soccer Tactics is way too imprecise, boring and repetitive to remain engaging for more than a few minutes. However, the turn-based idea has merit, but the game needs more refined mechanics in order to be worth a shot.