One of soccer’s most well known ambassadors is Pele. Every fan worth their salt at least knows of him. The man was an absolute legend and continues to try to grow the sport around the world. It’s no surprise that he would put his name and face on a soccer game, especially one geared towards children. Ubisoft’s Academy of Champions Soccer takes the World’s most popular sport, combines it with a some Harry Potter flavour and attempts to give younger gamers an opportunity to be a star. While it fails to reach superstar status itself, it might still be something younger gamers can enjoy.

Gameplay

The story behind Academy of Champions pits you as a young soccer fan given the opportunity to enrol in Pele’s Soccer School in hopes of becoming the next great legend. While it seems you’re destined for greatness, no one starts off on top; you will need to prove yourself on the pitch and off and grow as a player.

Your team, the Mighty Five, will begin as a group of losers and, in order to get better, you have to get practicing and winning matches.

Academy of Champions’ story is split up into various mini-games, talking and recruiting players, taking tests and of course matches. The mini-games, which act as training and the best opportunity to gain experience points, have you completing various objectives. These run from simply scoring a set amount of goals within a time limit, defending an area from the other team or stopping shots as a goalkeeper. Your scores during these modes will earn you money to spend on better equipment and experience can be spent improving the skills of your squad.

The mini-games are not the only way to get both money and experience. All modes, from simple gossip conversations, answering correctly on tests and even your performance on the pitch will help you improve your team.

When you’re not training your squad, your time will be spent playing the game’s modified version of soccer. This 5-a-side game is similar to other arcade soccer titles. It’s easy to pick up and is quite fun to play.

Most matches in the story mode take around 4 minutes and the objective is always to be the team who scores the most goals. The controls are extremely basic. There are more than a few control schemes available to you but the Wii Remote and Nunchuk seem to be the best suited to the gameplay. When the on attack, your A button is used to pass, Z button to perform dekes and B to shoot. On defence, only the A and Z buttons are used, with the former for tackling and the latter to sprint.

The controls are easy but the lack of variety does put some limitations on what you can do on the pitch. To remedy that, as you progress, you will unlock the ability to use special tricks. To do so, you must fill up your talent bar by performing key passes, winning jostle battles and scoring goals. While your bar can fill up, you also will need to unlock player-specific talents to be able to use them.

The action on the pitch is pretty fun but it ends up being short lived. During story mode, you spend more time doing everything but playing soccer and that makes it feel more like a reward rather than something you have to do. The mini-games are the biggest core to the story but they repeat themselves so frequently due to the fact that there are few of them available.

Since the story takes place over a school term, there will only be 4 or 5 key periods where you really need to perform well to progress. You can essentially put in half the effort and just focus on those few parts. The story mode would have been better suited to a smaller term length or with more incentives, challenges and most importantly, more soccer.

Graphics and Sound

The art style looks and feels very much like most modern Saturday morning cartoons. There’s certainly nothing special  about it but at the same time, it looks fairly decent. The character designs, especially that of your opposition are quite stereotypical. The snobbish sides all look like smug rich kids and the country specific teams and players look like the people of those nations.

The designs of the pitches is actually quite well done. A nice touch is that in each arena, when you score a goal, it causes the background to modify its look. For example, if you score in the American level, US landmarks like the Hollywood sign and the Grand Canyon will appear. Rather than these all appearing at once, they are revealed after each goal. At first ,only one landmark will show up but score 4 or more and the background will be completely cluttered.

There is no voice acting in game but the sound effects fit the cartoon style. Scoring goals, using your boost and even performing simple dekes, all have associated sound effects that are pulled off pretty well. They won’t blow your mind but they do the job to give you an enhanced experience.

Value

If you don’t feel like playing through the story, you can take some time and play either a quick match or the mini-games alone or with a friend. The quick match does feature all the teams from the story so you will need to play through that mode if you want to unlock them all.

A nice little touch in the story is the implementation of famous Ubisoft characters. Rabbids are everywhere as they are included in the game’s store and even make appearances in a few of the mini-games. Other Ubisoft characters like Sam Fisher and the Prince of Persia also make cameo appearances. It might just be a gimmick but you do have the opportunity to unlock a full Ubisoft team to play with.

Conclusion

The repetition in the story mode really prevents this from being more than an average title. Had there either been more variety in the mini-games or a greater emphasis on actual games of soccer, this would have been a completely different experience. Academy of Champions Soccer is far from a bad game, just one that could have offered so much more.