Virtua Striker 2002 Review

Arcade sports games are their own breed. It takes a different kind of game to get people to pull another quarter from their pocket than it does to get them to remain on the couch for an extra 30 minutes playing a typical console sports game. Normally, developers recognize this distinction and tailor their games to the audience and setting that they're intended for. But with Sega's Virtua Striker 2002 for the GameCube, it's hard to tell just which gaming environment the designers had in mind for the game.

The management options are incredibly deep.

Despite the lack of any sort of formal license, Virtua Striker 2002 has plenty of gameplay modes with enough depth to compete with any soccer simulation on the market. New to the series is the "road to the international cup" mode, in which you take over every last detail of running a soccer club. You can hold a training camp, where you train each player individually according to his position and then create a schedule that includes all the friendly matches you need to prepare your team for tournament play. You'll also have a budget to manage, so determining the right time to take on overseas matches is integral to your team's success. The schedule lasts for four years, so there's plenty of time to get your team ready. In this respect, Virtua Striker 2002 is very much like a soccer management simulation. In fact, soccer junkies may enjoy just sitting back, simulating all the games, and examining how different coaching strategies and practice techniques affect the team's on-field performance.

In addition to the extremely deep international cup mode, Virtua Striker 2002 has plenty of other gameplay options to keep you busy. You can enter leagues with up to 32 humans and take part in or construct customizable tournaments, where the teams are sorted into brackets. There's even a ranking mode in which you take on the computer and are scored based on your performance. However, the multiplayer mode supports just two players, and even then, it's impossible for both players to play cooperatively on the same team. This cuts into the game's long-term replay value considerably. Regardless of which gameplay mode you choose, most of the gameplay parameters are adjustable, such as offsides, penalties, and timekeeping. Save for its anemic multiplayer modes, Virtua Striker 2002 has plenty of gameplay options to keep you busy. Unfortunately, its poor gameplay renders all of these modes nearly worthless.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is simplistic and unbalanced.

Considering the Virtua Striker franchise was born in the arcades, it comes as little surprise that the gameplay involves just three buttons. But no one would guess that so little can be done with them. On offense, you have a long pass button, a short pass button, and a shoot button. There are no dekes or special moves to perform, there is no sprint option, and advanced passing techniques like give-and-gos are nowhere to be found. On defense, slide tackles are the only controllable action, and the computer automatically decides which kind of tackle is performed based upon your player's position relative to the ball and the opposing player. Because the offensive player has no move to counter the slide tackle, games quickly boil down to one steal after another. It's not out of the ordinary for each team to have more than 40 steals per match. If there were at least one offensive move to balance the slide tackle, the gameplay would be passable, but there isn't, and games quickly become a ridiculously repetitive cycle of steals. There's no flow to the gameplay at all, and getting off a pass becomes nearly impossible. Making any sort of an accurate pass is out of the question because you do not have the time to do so.