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Academy of Champions Soccer Hands-On Impressions

At long last, Pele and Sam Fisher meet up in this story-driven soccer game.

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Harry Potter meets soccer. It's not a mental association most of us would make on our own, but Ubisoft Vancouver is more than glad to bridge that gap with its upcoming Academy of Champions Soccer, which is due for release on the Wii in September. This arcade-style take on the beautiful game sports a fleshed out storyline in which you build up a team at the titular Academy of Champions, a renowned soccer school headed by none other than Pele. We recently played through a few matches at a Ubisoft press event to see what sort of hijinks you can expect out of the game (Hint: Sam Fisher using night-vision goggles to score a goal is one of them).

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Academy of Champions' storyline starts with the basics: Pick a boy or girl, give that player a name, and start your quest for soccer dominance against rival academies. Because your school is headed by Pele, some of the biggest lessons you'll learn are teamwork and selflessness. That mantra manifests itself in the talent meter, which is a gauge that you fill up during matches for successfully passing between players. Once you fill up this meter, you can trigger a special move for your player that, to name a few examples, will make you invulnerable to tackles or ridiculously fast. It's one of the few advanced techniques in a game that features an otherwise simple, bare-bones control scheme.

Later in the story, you'll run into some players who don't quite share that same dedication to fair play as your headmaster Pele. These players belong to a rival academy that trains its students to play dirty and win by any means necessary. One of the wrinkles in the storyline involves the rival's headmaster fixing some paperwork so you're actually forced to attend that vile institution for a brief period of time. Even in an arcade soccer game, it seems you must first taste the dark side before you can truly see the light.

The Harry Potter comparison extends into the game's visual style, which features vibrant, swirly backgrounds that feel like they could have been taken from the cover of a children's book. Likewise, character models are of an exaggerated style that is reminiscent of The Incredibles. That includes the student teams you can play with, as well as a few special Ubisoft-focused teams. Two unlockable clubs of special interest are Rabbids FC and Ubisoft FC. The former features a roster made up of the Raving Rabbids, while the latter features a cast of Sam Fisher, Altair, the Prince of Persia, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil, and Rayman himself. Each character has his or her own signature special move, including Sam's aforementioned ability to turn the lights out and use his night-vision goggles to score on unsuspecting opponents.

Like most sports games on the Wii these days, Academy of Champions will allow you to fine-tune your skills in a number of minigames. We tried two of these: One was an exercise in slide tackling, while another was a goalkeeping challenge. The first one was interesting because we were actually playing against Pele himself as we tried to tag five circles on the pitch blue without letting Pele tag them red. We had to sprint around and tackle the poor old soccer legend in order to achieve success, which made us feel mildly guilty but nonetheless triumphant. The other was a motion-control exercise where the player tilts the Wii Remote and Nunchuk to mimic the keeper's gloves in order to stop incoming goals.

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Academy of Champions looks like it could be a charming soccer game. The big question is whether the light gameplay can hold a player's attention throughout the course of a 16-hour storyline. If you're up to the task of finding that out, you'll want to circle your calendars for a September release.

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