Street Power Soccer Review – Kick it while it’s down

I’ve been struggling to find a fun new game to play recently, and so when Bastard-in-Chief Darryn approached me and asked if I’d like to review a funky street football game with some trick shots and skill moves thrown in for fun, it sounded like a great idea.

Being a huge football fan in general and having really enjoyed the EA Streets games, I was quite excited to see how developer Gamajun Games would put their unique spin on urban football. I wanted to see if it would turn out to be something I’d be happy to sink countless hours into or just a fun diversion to boot up while I wait for the family to get ready before heading out.

So I loaded up Street Power Soccer and quickly noticed that the music choices were… unique. I’m not a big music guy so maybe this is the new trend, but it sounded to me was as if the studio doing their best to avoid paying royalties for any real songs and simply coming up with a mish-mash of tunes that nearly sounded like actual music but were cut short and put on an infinite loop.

Not to mention that the music rarely ever matched where in the world the action was taking place, as I jumped over to Italy and heard traditional Indian music before heading to Kenya and listening to South American carnival music. It made no sense and definitely broke the immersion on more than one occasion.

But the worse was still to come.

Street football legend Sean Garnier popped into view in what must be the worst green screen implementation in video games since Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Not only was it jarringly obvious, but the audio wasn’t even synched correctly and it felt a bit like watching an old B-Grade Kung-Fu movie.

But I had to give the game a chance to at least let its gameplay shine, so I turned the music way down and jumped into the single-player “campaign”. The story starts off with you having to prove your skills across a variety of events such as Street Power Match which is 1v1, 2v2 or 3v3 street football, Trickshot in which you need to hit certain targets in a set time, Panna where you need to humiliate your opponent by passing the ball through his legs (nutmeg) and Freestyle, which is basically a rhythm game centered around doing tricks with the ball.

Out of all of these I found Trickshot to be the most entertaining as you can progress through the stages while attempting to hit more difficult targets in as fast a time as possible, while also looking for easter eggs to boost your bonus score. The thing is, it isn’t very difficult at all. There is more than enough time, the “trick shots” pretty much all revolve around aiming the arrow and then hitting the ball with a certain amount of power. Which is incredibly simple to replicate and master, and after 30 minutes or so I was pretty bored with this mode.

Now read that first section again, because that was the most entertaining mode.

Street Power Soccer is not a fun game, the music and sound effects are awful and the menu system appears to have been designed by a team of millennials bashing away on a keyboard. Graphically, this game isn’t up to standard in 2020 and the technical gameplay aspects are terrible. Your players will constantly warp around the pitch when playing, and on many many occasions, the ball and all the players will be off the screen and you just have to pretty much wait for the game to catch up and try to find them.

The “skills” in the game are nothing more than a case of hitting a single button and seeing what canned animation is played out. Street Power Soccer has added “challenges” to events to try and add more replayability, but in essence, you can play the football game once and be a master. Trickshot took 30 minutes to completely get bored of, Panna just felt like a dumb addition with no purpose and the rhythm mini-game was just annoying. It was also incredibly laggy, badly explained, and there felt like there was no real reward when you nailed all the moves.

But in fairness a lot of these games only really shine when you go into multiplayer, so through gritted teeth, I clicked the online option and went looking for a game against real human opponents.

After 10 minutes of searching I gave up and turned the game off.

The only redeeming thing I have to say about Street Power Soccer was that it was an original attempt at something new, and for a budget purchase, I’d say that it’s worth it to at least see the different stages on offer. I actually enjoyed the art style and the different stages you could choose from around the world, so at least that was good. Then I found out the game will set you back an entire $50. I couldn’t, with any moral fibre in my being, recommend that anyone pays $50 for this.

It’s simply not worth it.

Last Updated: September 1, 2020