I recently picked up Freestyle Street Soccer (FSS) at my local video store as a fun way to pass the weekend. I had played Electronic Arts’ FIFA series and had enjoyed taking various clubs from around the world against each other. I was curious as to how the world’s most popular game translated onto the streets in a no holds barred, no fouls version of a videogame. EA has released its versions of sports games with a street flavor with the most recent being NFL Street. I had a lot of fun with that title and was hoping for a similar twist on the actual game of football.

There are multiple modes one can play when starting up. In ‘Quick Play’, you choose a team and an opposing team and hit one of a handful of small, fenced off, larger than a basketball court but definitely smaller than a soccer field, courts. The idea throughout the game is to rack up combo points and get a Netbreaker. This is similar to Gamebreaker in the EA street games and allows you to score much quicker than otherwise. Unlike the EA games, there are no actual players from around the world in this game. All the characters are fictional so none have any name recognition. ‘Turf Wars’ is FSS’s form of other sports games’ season mode. You attack other gangs’ turfs in order to take them on. As you progress further, more teams and stadiums are unlocked but don’t expect anything grand. The unlockables can be counted on one hand and aren’t really that great.

Before the match, the opposing teams trade verbal jabs at each other similar to what is known as trash talking. But this trash talk doesn’t amount to much. A team says the same thing over and over no matter who they are playing. You occasionally hear in game comments from between the players and that is repetitive as well. The players are easy to control but getting them to do what you want them to is a different matter. Since the players take up a fair amount of space on your screen, you can’t always see exactly where your teammates are. This makes passing a hit and miss affair. Your teammate may be in front of you but you don’t know exactly where. For some reason, they seem to lag behind you rather than staying with you. One on ones between you and the goalie are a regular occurrence. Your teammates are hard pressed to play catch up when playing defense as well. The opposing player may have already taken a shot on goal before help arrives. While your goalie is pretty good at these shootouts, unless you lighten his burden he will be your downfall. The computer controls the goalie and he has a tendency of coming out of the goal to assist you. While that may be a pretty good strategy on a regular soccer field, this can lead to quick goals on the smaller courts of FSS.

When a goal does take place, and believe me it will happen frequently, a celebration occurs and a loop of the play leading to the goal repeats. The same celebrations are shown over and over and quickly become tiring. Any team you choose, the animations are similar in design minus the skin color or gender. The developer’s idea of giving personality to the various teams was to give players from the inner city urban style clothes with a rap soundtrack while the kids from England have the orange hair and the grunge soundtrack. Seriously, can you imagine street soccer being played on the courts of Harlem? It’s all very surreal. Even the Netbreaker moves are the same across the teams with just a different name. Yawn.

The graphics reminded me of earlier generations of hardware; specifically the late end of the PlayStation in terms of graphics for the sports games for the ’99 and 2000 sports year. The backgrounds are somewhat dark and are supposed to add flavor to the various locales and courts though nothing really catches your eye on screen. The player animations are fluid but very repetitive all across the board.



The soundtrack may be the saving grace for this game. It has licensed music from various modern groups and it sounds pretty good. Though the in game use of the music makes you want to turn down your TV when playing. For one half of play, one song representative of one side loops over and over and the song for the opposing side loops for the second half. You can’t change the play list of the songs and the repetition quickly becomes annoying.

Did anyone count how many times I said the word repetitive or a variation of it? Let me mention it again. Freestyle Street Soccer is repetitive. It’s enjoyable for just a short while but its novelty quickly wears off. There is just not enough there in the game to make you stay and want to play again.