Soccer Story: a lovely premise let down by filler and repetition

The vibrant, pixel art world of Soccer Story is a lovely place to be. Gentle, acoustic guitar music soothes as I walk through Soccertown, talking to NPCs and completing tasks that all involve or closely relate to the beautiful game. It’s referred to as soccer (as the title suggests) but I tend to call it football.

Much like a football match, I was full of anticipation for Soccer Story and its different direction to games like FIFA 23. The art style brings to mind Game Boy Advance games like Pokémon Emerald or Golden Sun, with a more modern aesthetic thanks to crisp colours and plenty more pixels to work with. However, visuals only go so far.

See the trailer for Soccer Story here

The gameplay of Soccer Story, while fairly varied, feels uninspired. The actual football matches are fun enough, pitting teams of five against one another in four-minute-long games. While the controls are simple, they provide enough control for you to feel like you’re really earning your wins. I celebrated some goals like they genuinely mattered, because in the context of the game they were valuable.

Sadly, much of the game’s other sequences are at best dull, and at worst painful. Everything basically involves a football, and rightly so, but too many things come down to kicking a ball at a number of objects. I wouldn’t mind this because it makes sense for the ethos of the game, except that there are far too many pieces of busywork to inflate the story.

No More Robots

Even more frustrating are the number of times the game ceased working. Playing on Xbox Series X, on multiple occasions I was unable to input commands. The controller wasn’t the problem as I was able to go back to the home menu and select options from there. Each time I had to completely restart my console to get back into the game and continue playing.

Hopefully this technical issue can be patched out, but the game’s tedious gameplay sequences in between matches make me not want to press on any further. I won some matches, picked up a trophy, but I’m done with Soccer Story, much to my disappointment. It’s a great idea but the execution just isn’t there.

Soccer Story is out now on Xbox (version tested), PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and PC. Code for the game provided by the publisher.