Master Kick

Developed by iNDUSTRY and published by Clickgamer, Master Kick attempts to bring all the fun and thrills of Table Football to your iPhone and iPod touch. As a kid I used to hate football (and to be far, still do), but used to love a game of table football so was torn about how I should feel about a game such as this and so went into it not entirely sure what to expect and with no preconceptions as to how it would work.

The controls are simple enough, tilt the device to move your players from side to side and touch the screen to charge the power of the kick. These work well enough, but due to having to hold down to charge the power it meant that at crucial moments you miss your chance at scoring an ever elusive goal. When you consider that the odds of you ever wanting to use anything other than full power I feel that it would work so much better if you didn’t have to charge the power and it should simply be touch to kick.

There are two types of game mode here, quick play and league. Quick play is as you would expect, jump straight into a game and see how you fare. League play allows you to play against all of the other teams to try for that acclaimed top spot. The game also has the very handy auto save so you can pick up where you left off if interrupted. Nothing new or innovative here, but then, we are talking table football.

There are 6 ”˜teams’ to choose from (although as far as I am aware, there is no difference in how any of them actually play). You can also choose from a choice of 7 different formations, choose the cpu level, which has 7 difficulty settings ranging from Superb to Loser. You can also pick from 6 different playfields (again as far as I can tell this simply affects the backdrop and has no actual affect on how the game plays out).

Overall the game is okay. I wasn’t blown away by it, but neither did I run for the hills at the thought of having to review it. I do feel that it’s slightly overpriced for what it is and I’m not sure how much replay value is here. There’s no online functionality and no two player mode. A nice try, but needs a bit of work before it could be deemed a must have game.