Pocket Soccer

Summary

Various clients, cloud services, battery monitors and mobile editors are all well and good—but keeping with the Christmas spirit we thought we'd review a fun game for you today. So without further ado let's dive right into Pocket Soccer!

I've been an avid Android user since it's very early days. In those days the Play Store (or rather Android Market) was dominated by apps that helped transform a smartphone into a Swiss Army Knife: compass, metal detector and torch/flashlight apps were all the rage. There weren't that many games around though, every now and then something really cool would get everyone excited, but the real boom happening after Angry birds hit the scene.
But before the blockbuster game era my Motorola Milestone was riddled with small, relatively unknown games; I found these games to be responsible for lot of what made Android so charming in the early days.
This is what drew me to Pocket Soccer: the game is well made, unpretentious and it makes me reminiscent of the good ol' days of Android. In short: it's a good time-killer type game, and that's exactly what I was looking for on Christmas Eve day.

Pocket Soccer is a fun mix of European football/soccer and Airhockey. Two teams, with three pucks each, are up against each other. You take turns shooting, and if you're not quick enough you'll lose your turn. To be clear: Pocket Soccer is not a turn-based game: it's a real time game. The objective is to get the ball into the opponent's goal, and in true Airhockey style you'll find that the pucks slide across the table, which can make scoring a bit tricky.

Single player mode has three difficulty levels. There's also an option with playing with another person on the same device, as well as undergoing various training situations.

Bottom line:

Pocket Soccer harkens back to the Days Of Android Yore: short-lived, easy and fun entertainment.
 

Pocket Soccer isn't the fanciest application when it comes to design, but it feels like a classic Android game.

Controls are nice and simple: all gamers need to is manipulate the puck with the tip of the index finger. There are various techniques for firing and aiming+firing, some of them are quicker, some are more precise. We'll leave it up to you to experiment and decide which technique to use in which situation.

The menu isn't as user friendly to use as we'd like it to be, but it'll do.

Pocket Soccer runs well, without crashing. The only critique I'd have is that the when the device goes into standby mode and is then reactivated the game starts up from the beginning and whatever you had achieved within a level is lost.

Pocket Soccer is available for free from the App Center and from Google Play. Ad banners are displayed but only within the menu and not throughout the game.