Original Release: Sega, 2002, Gamecube / Xbox / PS2
Sega’s self-branded soccer game takes the odd tack of not using any Sega characters or elements, instead going for kind of an NFL Blitz equivalent
Sega Soccer Slam (Gamecube, Sega, 2002)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
You see the name “Sega Soccer Slam,” you naturally think Sonic and such … instead this game gives you Punch-Out style national stereotype characters, with nary a Sega franchise mention to be found. They did something similar with their handheld casino game too, I didn’t understand the reasoning any better there.
Anyway, Soccer Slam turns out to be basically the NFL Blitz formula applied to soccer. Simplified version of the game with fewer players (3-on-3), big muscly cartoon characters, enclosed arenas with no “out of bounds” areas, and physics-defying Super Shots aplenty.
The game instantly feels cheap as it becomes quickly apparent that the AI is tilted against you. Their goalkeeper is near-perfect, yours is prone to bouts of really stupid mistakes. Your AI is never in proper position for passes or rebounds, like ever; theirs score off one-timers and rebounds that knock the keeper over all the time. Their defense is competent and agressively pursues the ball, yours wanders around like a bunch of mongs.
It seems like the purpose of all this is to push you to play Hero Ball and lean on the game’s variety of Super Shots to make up for your teammate deficiencies. Which, to me, is a boring formula. On top of that, the game does a poor job explaining how its Super Shots work, especially the Ultimate Super Shot (I couldn’t make sense of the spartan tutorial module that’s supposed to cover it, it’s some weird chain of multiple passes in a fussy way followed by a shot).
The camera isn’t giving you any help. You can select from four fixed positions, having to stop the game to go into the pause menu to make the change. All of them suck anyway. The field is greatly compressed and yet they’re all too pulled in to show a substantial amount of it. The side view is the most functional, but still bad as you won’t see defenders approaching until they’re hitting you when you’re on the attack.
The game has six teams to pick from and a basic season mode, which it calls “Quest Mode” for some reason. You play 10 matches and a playoffs, and earn money after each match that can be put into upgrades for individual players; unfortunately, that means the AI imbalance and enemy competence increases as you go to compensate for the upgrades you’re buying. From where it starts out it gets pretty unplayable pretty fast.
The aesthetics are bleh as well. I could care less about the crude racial/ethnic stereotypes, but the characters are all ugly and boring and the game’s humor is tryhard kids cartoon level.
As with any soccer review I do, you could possibly chalk some of this up to my total lack of interest in the game. I freely disclose that I’ve never followed it, I barely understand the basics and I’m too old now for any of this to change. But this is the precise type of soccer game that’s aimed at people like me, and that I’ve enjoyed in the past (see the reviews of Mario Strikers or Mega Man Soccer for example). Soccer Slam got really good reviews across the board when it came out, all the more befuddling if you hold it up right next to Mario Strikers and see how superior Strikers is for this sort of casual arcadey take on the sport.
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