Kenny Dalglish Soccer Match

The Good
There are worse football games out there, and we could generously assume that the game was cut-down to ensure that it could be recreated on the C64.

The Bad
All you can do is play single matches between a team in red and a team in blue, which must be at least 10 minutes long. There are no tournaments, no formation options or substitutions, and no player names or numbers specified during the game (which makes pre-match advice such as "watch their number 10" laughable). Even if the matches themselves had some quality, this would be inexcusable.

As for the matches themselves, words fail me. Attempts to bring the ball under your control often result in your player stepping right over it, and it's virtually impossible to hit the ball softly. The ball always goes a long way, and bounces up high enough to clear the goal even if it was 30 yards away. In fact, there are 2 ways to score - shoot from about 40 yards away and watch it bounce, rise, bounce and then hit the top of the goal, or to simply attempt to run the ball into the goal (the keepers will often assist by getting out of the way). I won my first match 7-0 - it must've taken 1000 games of Sensi before I got anything like that against a top team.

The scrolling is jerky and often loses sight of the ball, throw-ins often involve the ball being thrown a superhuman distance, the pitch markings are completely wrong, there are no fouls or free-kicks, and the whole thing is generally shoddy.

The Bottom Line
In an era when Kick Off and Emlyn Hughes International Soccer were starting to recreate football in a thrilling and realistic way, this represents a terrible anachronism. It's slow, clumsy, empty and completely lacking in atmosphere. Worth checking out for sheer comedy value.