Sensible Soccer 2006 review

Scoring goals can be overly tricky. This isn't just us being crap - some of the keepers, besides, say, the ones at Stoke or Luton, are superhuman. Therefore you can discount howitzers from distance - most of the time - and unless you're square onto the goal, you'll be lucky to get the ball on target anyway - aftertouch, a trademark of Sensi, is insanely sensitive, and the slightest twitch of the stick sends the ball miles wide.

But the biggest problem Sensi has is its acute lack of atmosphere. Even on the Amiga, there was raucous, if unintelligible, crowd noise. Here, the fans are so quiet as to be inaudible, and it makes matches feel so lacking in said atmosphere, you may as well be having a kickabout in space.

Above: This surely isn't supposed to be Rio Ferdinand. Surely

In Sensi's favour, there are stacks of competitions to enter - every team from every major league is here, with all the requisite knockout tournaments, including (of course) the World Cup. You can make your own competitions, and customise all the teams and players.

And while it certainly doesn't look amazing, what really could be done to make a top-down football game look sexy? The visuals function perfectly, well, functionally. The menus are clunky, though, especially the team selection one, where you have to v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y keep clicking right to cycle through every side in the list.

As we said, oh dear. The simple fact is that this isn't even fit to lace the boots of those early Amiga versions of Sensible Soccer. It's nowhere near as fun as that was, and it genuinely hurts us to say that.