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Freestyle Street Soccer 
Release date: 25 Mar 2004
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Mygamer review
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Are you enjoying this?
You've probably never heard of GameCube's Freestyle Street Soccer, published by the late Acclaim Entertainment, and there are a number of reasons why. Don't let the Blockbuster Exclusive label fool you; it means Blockbuster Video is the only retailer in the country willing to carry this product. You won't even find this game available for PS2 - SCEA wouldn't accept it for publication. Originally titled Urban Freestyle Soccer, Freestyle places you in control of a local gang of thugs out to conquer rival gangs' territories by defeating them in full-contact soccer…wait, what?
There are five primary modes, most of which are nearly identical. Quick Start auto-selects two random teams and puts you right into the game. The primary game mode is Turf Wars, where one or two players battle across nine rival gang urban territories, gaining the territory for themselves with each victory. This serves only to unlock Home Turf - the exact opposite of Turf Wars. Here you choose a territory and defend it against invading gangs…I mean teams…I mean gangs…I mean teams…This again unlocks only another ridiculously similar mode of play called Street Challenge, a combination of Home Turf and Turf Wars. In Freestyle Mode, goals are irrelevant and the winner is the player with the most Skill Points.
Completing Training Mode prior to entering Turf Wars unlocks a bonus for your team stats, which can be assigned to either speed, skill, power or shooting. Tutorial allows the user to perform skills and tricks as text cards appear on the screen explaining what to do, however you'll receive the same reward for putting the controller down and walking away for the tutorial's duration. No interaction is required.
All modes are completely devoid of any story; the closest you'll get is, prior to game play, the two opposing gangs will execute generic taunt animations and talk trash to one another. Similar animations take place at half-time and after scoring goals. Here the incredibly ugly character models are showcased, complete with clipping problems and flashing textures. Even Freestyle's font is ugly and difficult to read. The dribbling animation is terrible; the ball is all but attached to the player's foot. When you stop, the ball magically stops with you no matter how fast you were going and there is no ball-controlling animation.
At its cold, black heart, Freestyle is just a soccer game without rules. An important part of game play is the Skill Bar. By keeping the ball in your possession, Chipping the ball (a fancy form of passing) and acting aggressively towards the opposing team, Skill Points accumulate filling the Skill Bar and eventually a special Netbuster move becomes available. Here is where it really goes down hill. Chipping frequently sends the ball to nowhere in particular, and the Netbuster is only available for approximately 30 seconds, and must be performed in a hotspot that appears randomly on the field with no indication as to where it is. If you lose the ball and regain it, the hotspot appears in a different location and you must quickly hunt it down again.
Netbusters will either knock down the opposing team and guarantee a goal or do nothing. Even something as simple as turning around is difficult because the players can't just stop and turn around; they have to do a trick first, leaving you vulnerable to having the ball stolen. Precise movement is impossible and this alone often leads to the user scoring on himself when trying to move the ball away from his goal.
A.I. players offer little to no assistance, so expect to do all of the work alone while covered by two opponents at once. You'll get the ball, have it stolen, get it back, have it stolen etc., and game play becomes extremely repetitive. Your teammates do little or nothing to assist with defense and goalies are completely autonomous and can't be controlled until they're throwing in the ball. This means it's up to the CPU to protect your goal.
By pressing L, R, X and Y together, you can pick up objects scattered about the fields and heave them at people. Just like Freestyle Street Soccer, this is fun in theory, but is implemented terribly, as you can't have the ball and hold an object at the same time, and usually by the time you pick something up, the character holding it is no longer on the screen. Not even the four-player multiplayer can save this debacle because when Chipping and passing, you never know which player the ball is going to.
Even worse than the bad presentation and monotonous game play is the blatant racism - these characters are the embodiment of modern stereotypes. The Street Kai, an all Asian team are "martial arts fanatics", and the captain of Shakedown is a black man named Tyrone who lives on the West-side with his friends G-man, O-dog and Leroy.
The voice work complements this bigotry perfectly. You'll hear Vatos of the Low Riders, a southern, family-based team, shout things like, "You gonna regret that, homies!" and, "Esse, you so fried!" Freestyle is full of gratuitously overused street slang and you can expect to hear, "Word up, G," "Bust your skill, G," and "Slow your role, G," over and over again just for the sake of hearing it. There's also plenty of cursing because as we all learned from BMX XXX that cursing makes games better, and songs repeat infinitely during game play rather than randomizing or playing in any kind of order. Not only is Freestyle Street Soccer boring, broken and despicable, it's a testament to why Acclaim Entertainment went bankrupt.
Review by Dave Kaplan on 5 Oct 2004
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