Get some balls
It's not quite as well known or as good as classic soccer games like Sensible Soccer or Kick Off, but Viva Football provides some fairly decent entertainment for when you're in the mood for a kick around. In many ways it offers pretty much what you'd expect from a footy game but it also serves up a few nice extras for history buffs. The game itself is a side scroller, rather than a vertical one as is so often the case and offers the usual mix of teams, players and options to pick from. However, the real draw here is that you can take part in all World Cups from 1958 to 1998 and attempt to re-write history by playing it your way. You have all the players and teams from the period so if you know your classic, then this will be perfect for you. Apart from this aspect though, it's very much business as usual, although it is hard to say what else can be done with the genre, as there are only so many ways of representing the sport on the small screen. And for the most part, Viva Football is pretty successful. The historical additions give it a big draw and it's undeniably enticing to play with the legends and see how you would have fared back in the day. The visuals are solid, with some decent animation and with the players moving around at a good pace, but again there isn't much you can do with a green pitch and a couple of dozen players. Controls are nice and responsive, being intuitive and flexible enough to make pulling off moves a relative breeze. A few issues prevent the game from being a classic, but it gets the job done and is worth a look.
