Hidden away in the murky depths of the gaming industry away from prying eyes is a dark, mysterious entity. It lurks unknown to many, swallowing up unsuspecting passers-by. I’m not talking about some deranged vacuum cleaner, I’m talking about the infamous Bermuda Triangle of games development. You see, every year helpless features in the latest games suddenly disappear without a trace never to surface again. They just vanish, gobbled up by something, somewhere, and that’s not always a good thing. One of the victims of this terrible fate was FIFA ‘97’s indoor 6-a-side mode. An ingenious addition to the series, it was probably the fastest and craziest football experience available for a long, long time. The ball bounced off every conceivable surface in the tiny courts with their miniature goals. There were even screeching trainers-on-floor sound effects. Brilliant.

It’s a real shame that the current crop of football games offer nothing like FIFA ‘97’s unique gameplay mode - it’s all just boring football simulations. That’s about to change though, with Acclaim’s latest game, Urban Freestyle Soccer. As soon as you read the title, you know what’s coming; lightening quick games of football in run down, concrete jungles. There are no rules here, with teams consisting of four grown men or women battling it out in the inner city. The skills of these urban athletes are impressive; they hop along walls covered in graffiti, around their opponents, juggle the ball and use the scenery and lack of restraints to their advantage. This is football at its roots; just two goals, a ball and the players. It’s time to leave the terraces and get down to the streets.

Urban Freestyle Soccer boils down to 4-a-side games of football where there are no rules or boundaries. The control scheme is surprisingly not a clone of FIFA’s, with the button layout more geared towards fancy footwork and trickery than actual football. ‘X’ changes player and passes as usual whilst ‘O’ is a chipped pass and ‘Triangle’ passes off of a wall. ‘Square’ shoots and tackles, with R1 and L1 combined with the face buttons for over the top moves. This reasonably simple control system keeps the basics down to a few buttons, with the special moves activated by the shoulder buttons if you need them.

Unlike the current crop of football sims, Urban Freestyle Soccer doesn’t care if it fails to represent real football. Passes are almost laser-guided (although like smart bombs, they don’t always work!) and the players move the ball with insane precision and skill. Even a simple pass is made into a show of ball skills, with little juggles and taps thrown in here and there. It really starts to get crazy when you take a shot on goal or perform a trick - players cartwheel Matrix-style and spin all over the place, making scoring spectacular. The ball is flicked over, under and round bodies and eventually into the back of the net. Half of the moves the characters do are probably physically impossible, but they look badass and that’s what counts!

Fancy tricks have no real use in proper football, but this is far from authentic and here style counts for a lot. For every trick you perform or combo you produce, you receive a certain number of points. These help to build up a meter at the top of the screen and when it’s full you active the Netbuster moves for a limited time. A circular spotlight appears in the playing area and going into it and pressing R1+L1+a face button unleashes a Netbuster move. The game cuts to a closer camera angle showing an über insane move that cannot be stopped and sends the ball right into the back of the net with a flash of blue lightening. Nice.

Needless to say, Urban Freestyle Soccer is very fast for a football game. The pitches you play on are tiny in comparison to the real thing, making for high and quick scoring games. Possession also moves between teams frequently as you can do anything to get the ball. On top of the normal tackles, you can obstruct, punch and even throw objects at your opponents. Players who aren’t even on the ball are also taken down before they have a chance to shoot or pass to a teammate. Thankfully, the balance between violence and football is a pretty good one, with the scoring of goals placed firmly above dismembering the other team.

Although the game includes support for two to four players, most of the time you’ll be playing against the computer. Surprisingly, the A.I. is actually quite good, even on the ‘Easy’ setting. There are the occasional hiccups when people get trapped in the scenery, but this happens rarely. Sometimes the opposition’s goal scoring ability and your goalkeeper’s lameness is suspicious, but this isn’t too much of a problem. Urban Freestyle Soccer’s gameplay isn’t bad at all, it’s quite fun but it could do with some tweaking and polishing to make it more enjoyable.

Graphically, the game is distinctly average; no more, no less. The menus are hard to read and when the game starts up it presents you with too many options; things that should be saved instead of being put up every time you play. To its credit though, it does support widescreen and 60Hz mode, something few games do. The basic visuals are okay, but they suffer from bad anti-aliasing and a general unpolished feel. Animations are pretty good, but they are relatively few in number compared to other games. Urban Freestyle Soccer’s graphics could have been so much better, but it seems like it’s a case of badoptimisationitis as it’s known in the profession.

The audio is nothing special either, with various wooshes and swishhes accompanying the arrgghhs and the uhhhs in the sound effects department. The soundtrack is suitably chosen to complement the urban theme of the game, with a selection of licensed tracks blurting out when the game deems it appropriate. Ultimately, games like this don’t need awesome audio, but it would have been nice to have a tad more effort put into this department.

Urban Freestyle Soccer has the usual selection of game modes to encourage you to play more, but you can’t help feeling shortchanged. It’s undoubtedly a great idea, but it lacks the polish that other developers would give it. In fact, it’s surprising that EA Big haven’t made something like this yet; their input could make the idea behind Urban Freestyle Soccer into an awesome game. At the end of the day - as footballers seem to say far to often - it’s a game of two halves. The concept and gameplay are pretty good, but it suffers from a severe lack of polish in the graphics and audio departments. I really hope that the idea behind it doesn’t get swallowed up by the Triangle again because this is something football fans have been waiting a while for. Let’s just pray for a sequel.