Bafflingly poor! I feel sick just thinking about the fact that I wasted my time playing this, let alone money.
Due to my previous enjoyment of the original, I decided to give this a go. Sure it was a football game, but the extremely simple style of play (4 direction buttons and shoot and kick plus the newly added sprint) should lend itself to the P.C better than other football games, plus the Sensible Soccer name should have been a mark of approval.
Yet oddly Sensible Soccer finds a way to prove me wrong on both of the fronts where I believed it would be strong. To start with, it completely betrays the good name it had, this game really is poor.
Secondly, and perhaps more oddly, it lets you down because, as a simple game, it's practically unplayable. In my experience, simple games tend to be more immediately playable and have less variation in playability. They are almost the dead certs of the game world. A safe bet. If you get a game as simple as this, it should be fun for at least a while, and you should get sick of it, it's because of the lack of depth, not because of the game play. However Sensible Soccer 2006 bucks the trend in this respect also.
Looking at the actual game, Sensible Soccer suffers from the same problems as the previous one with regards to licensing. (They haven't done it). Whilst some of the more familiar names can be worked out, good luck working out the names of the Togo defence. The menu presentation is reasonable, efficient perhaps being a better word. Everything is there but it's nothing amazing.
Setting up leagues and cups is simple enough, although setting up a Tournament is a little more frustrating as it is impossible to even group the teams together in the group stages let alone determine the path of each qualifying team to the finals and even the pre set World Cup, whilst containing the correct teams, does not have them in the correct group!
There is some unlockable content which you can obtain by winning tournaments, but most of this is superflous (a positive in my opinion) and I couldn't really be bothered to unlock most of this.
The in game graphics are, I must admit, pretty good. They are not good in the breathtaking sense, but that's not what Sensible Soccer is supposed to be about. That said, everything looks reasonable for what you'd expect.
The real let down for this game though is where I had expected it to excel. They had actually made it simpler than the Mega Drive version (where there were three buttons to shoot as opposed to two). The real let down though is the control of the players. It's difficult to make them do ANYTHING. Want to make some sort of midfield run? Forget it! It's almost impossible to get past any player, and that works both ways. It's incredibly easy to tackle the opposing team, and they seem to have 100% success in their tackles. It doesn't matter though because whoever gets tackled will get tackled pretty shortly after. No your only chance of getting the ball out of midfield is to aimlessly kick it towards your opponents goal and hope one of your players is on the recieving end. But this is where it really gets boring. Shooting under pressure. The control system is unbelievably frustrating. With the LEFT DOWN RIGHT UP controls, it's almost impossible to aim at the goal or cross from the wing. By far your best bet for scoring is to run perpendicular to one corner of the goals and just blast the ball, and somehow with the psuedo 3D environment, this just inst particularly satisfying.
The game is quite easy once you get into it also. Once you learn the three or four 'tricks' within the first three games you can easily win friendlies (I never could be arsed with cups or leagues). However I would have to say the learning curve on this game must either be enormous (more time than I have played) or it is just impossible to get enjoyable gameplay out of it.
My disappointment with this game really cannot adequetly be put into words. It's so bad I would think it was a waste of time if it was a freebie off a website. For £15, it's frankly asonishingly bad.