Active Soccer 3 PC (P2P-Final)

It has responsive easy-to-learn/hard-to-master controls. Explosive retro arcade action is back! Active Soccer 3 provides a complete career mode, implementing many international leagues, cups and championships. Imagine being the manager of a 5th division English team – you have a budget and your goal is to be promoted to higher divisions, by purchasing players, creating tactics, managing the team and playing real matches! The graphics are excellent, and the choice of views to play with is impressive. The main thing is that you can play up and down the screen like the good old SWOS days.

Active Soccer 3 certainly looks as detailed as a football game needs to be (there’s no need to see close-ups of players’ faces every five seconds), and editing should be simpler because of it. The fact that you can select kits at the start of a match is a great touch and has long been a welcome feature. The gameplay is solid, and there is already a career option, which many players have been looking for. From a playability point of view, it’s already rating highly. Most of the elements gel together nicely, but players aren’t quite as reactive as they could be.

Shooting can be hit and miss—you can score plenty of goals, but it often feels like more chances should be converted. This may be because a career was started with a fifth-division team with poor stats, but shots can sometimes be taken in the direction the controller was pointing a moment earlier rather than where intended. This could also be a matter of becoming more familiar with the controls. If you make a diagonal run into the box, for instance, and don’t change direction suddenly, you can pull off a great strike. The players’ turning circle feels cumbersome, and quite often the pass receiver doesn’t pick up the ball when they should.

That said, these are issues that much of the community has already fed back on, and the developer appears to be very active in addressing them. Defending is absolutely appalling. There’s just no logic to it—just run into the player and get the ball. There’s no in-game pause menu in Active Soccer 3 to see stats, performance ratings, or anything of the sort for either side. Career mode has no ages for players, so the database seems timeless. That would be really difficult to add. Even though there is a lot of tactical customization, it doesn’t translate in-game outside of the very loose zones players occupy. Otherwise, there is no logic to why they are there.