New Star Soccer for Android – Review

Our rating:

By: New Star Games Ltd

Version #: 1.15

Date Released:

Developer:

Price: 2.99

User Rating:

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Sometimes, it seems as if even the crappest games can draw you in and turn into something disproportionately addictive. Especially with the premise that you’re a single footballer who starts in the lower echelons of the football league, with the aim of becoming the world’s greatest player.

This is exactly what New Star Soccer brings to the table. With this simple concept, it almost doesn’t matter that the game is incredibly basic in other areas. The fact is that your imagination does most of the work with a game like this, which is why I ended up playing it for far longer than I care to admit.

Technically, NSS is about balancing your player’s personal life with his professional life. You earn money, negotiate contracts and move to bigger clubs, while also buying property, maintaining a relationship with your boss and even – if you’re lucky – with your girlfriend. Hell, you can even go gambling

Sounds exciting, right? However, all these ‘personal’ aspects of your player are reduced to green bars, basic decisions between training with your ‘Team’ or taking you ‘Girlfriend’ for a meal, and card games where you have to match up two cards. These aren’t exciting tasks, so what could’ve been a fun RPG-style element to the game ends up feeling like a chore.

The matches themselves are equally rudimentary, although they do require some skill. You don’t pick your position, but given the positions on the pitch you end up on you could describe yourself as an Attacking Midfielder. You don’t control your actual player, with your interactions on the ball being reduced to aiming your shot, then hitting the ball at the right angle as it bounces across your screen in a mock-first-person kind of view.

Along with basic training manoeouvres, that’s essentially the game. But where it gets satisfying is making that perfect 40-yard pass, being called up to the international squad and scoring on your debut, or getting 30+ goals in a season. Reaching such landmarks feels incredibly rewarding, even if the only reward you really get for it is little stats saying it.

NSS could be a much more involved game. You should have the option of actually controlling your player, and the off-the-field aspect really could be much more fun, with more interactions with team-mates, lunches with rival managers, affairs with supermodels, and all the other unsavoury things players get up to. With that extra mile of depth, this game could be utterly unputdownable. As it stands, it’s pretty damn close anyway.

We rate this app 3.5 out of 5 stars.