World Soccer: Winning Eleven 9

The Good
You can't just win the ball by dramatic sliding tackles by an inferior player, you have to use your team to press the opposition as you would in a real football match. Players of lesser skill have less chance of flying past an average full back and makes this much more realistic than the previous incarnation. Scoring takes genuine skill and a bit of game intelligence and realistic knowledge of the game of football really does help. The management mode allows you to take a lowly team, and make them world beaters. Although however many times you play John Terry is still going to be outpaced by almost any player in the game.

The Bad
Too often it is easier to beat a superior team due to their tactics, than a lesser team. Lesser teams just pack their defences with basically just 2 attacking players and this does get very frustrating. The only way to score is a lucky set piece which is a rarity.

The fact that there is no licence for most of the top european leagues is a pain, although all of the top players are recognisable by their appearance. Patches are available to make the names match the appearances, or if you have a spare decade you could rename them yourself.

The game does have a very consoley feel in the menus, but most games do nowadays, but still annoying.

The Bottom Line
If you have played football, watch football and want a pure gameplay experience then this is the game for you.