Review: Pure Football

The world’s finest players are meeting to test themselves against one another, to play football without the distractions of their professional life. At stake is the most important thing of all – their honour. These 5-a-side matches are intense, fast-paced and spectacular, with a level of aggression and physicality that would never be allowed in the professional game. These matches take place on stunning, private grass pitches across Europe and ultimately South Africa where the very best footballers of the past and present will clash to decide the greatest Pure Football team of all.

Pros:

• Nice arcade take on the football genre
• Unlock real licensed players
• Fast flowing game
• Pure shots are accrued via shots take, tackles and give your players the ability to do a power shot on goal
• Campaign will take around 6-8 hours to complete depending on skill, offers a variety of game modes from, first to score x amount of goals, a 5 minute game, knock out tournaments, start a goal behind and harder ones like each unsuccessful tackle is a penalty
• Every game has objectives that once met unlock a new player to transfer in to your team. Objectives can be things like, 6 consecutive passes, take x amount of shots on goal, to harder ones like have 75 percent possession
• You can create your own player and earn upgrade points by playing well in games, then you can choose which stats to upgrade and make him what ever sort of player you want
• Shooting/passing is all done via a power meter system, one you would expect to see in golf game, press to start the needle moving then release in the targeted area for maximum power or accuracy
• You can create your own team along with name and emblem, design your home and away kits and you unlock more designs through playing the campaign
• Transfer player system is very well done and easy to use. Press R2 to see the list of players unlocked and click x to select them then L2 to flip back to your squad and swap em out. Can be done as much or as little as you like. Players all have different strengths and weaknesses so pick em wisely
• Controls are simple with one button used for fancy shots and the right stick as your skill moves. All the other buttons are what you would expect from FIFA
• Slow mo camera shots happen when you take certain attempts on goal or pure shots which actually work well and do look cool
• You dont get yellow and red cards, instead doing bad tackles fills your foul bar, fill it all the way and it gives the other team a penalty. The timer slowly goes down in game

 

Cons:

• Loading times are common and take an age, even simply loading your character upgrade screen. Restarting a game can sometimes take just as long as the initial load
• Graphics do look bad, opting for tall heavy top half skinny ass legs bottom half approach, all players look ‘roided right up. The graphics are more last gen than this gen
• The amount of both skill moves and skill shots are lacking and after a while all look the same and do the same thing
• Online is shut down and upon investigation this happened out of the blue with no warning given
• Animations are sluggish and do a lot of damage to the game speed, especially with regards to tackles, once the animation has begun you cannot cancel out of it and they take ages to get up
• The AI is brilliant against you but terrible with you, they will run away from the ball, get as close to other team preventing a pass
• No commentary and instead we get some cheesy music with occasional shout outs from the players, and let me tell you their dictionary of words are small!
• Only two camera angle are available. One being your typical side on view, the other a action over the shoulder type view. The second view in particular makes it hard to see whats happening up the pitch. Both how ever struggle with fast camera changes such as on throw ins and corners
• Shot direction requires no skill and in most cases its pre determined for you
• When you initiate run, the screen blurs, pure pants as all it does is skew your view and make your screen go all funny
• Learning the new style of game that this is can be tricky and frustrating for the first few games
• Input lag is quite bad and more noticeable later in game when your against faster opponents

In summary, If you can pick this game up for cheap or want a different take on football, then it is a good game. Little learning curve difficulty, but you can defiantly get some enjoyment out of it. Shame about the servers getting shut off as it looked like it could be a good kick about every now and then. If they were to do a second one of these I would urge them to tweak and add things to the basics such as passing and shooting. After a while the game is just one big power meter watching, occasionally pressing x button masher game.