Soccer Up Online is a game with a simple task- to let you and your friends play a game of European Football over the internet. Amazingly, this title manages to stumble at nearly every chance possible, with nothing working like it should, leaving behind a disappointing product.

Soccer isn't a complicated sport, at least it shouldn't be if tacked in its simplest form. The only core mechanics are passing, dribbling, shooting and running, which are required to make the game playable. Soccer Up Online manages to somehow miss the target with all of these. Passing is probably the best mechanic in the game, other than the fact that characters can pass in awkwardly slow and delayed kicks that your opponent can easily scoop up.


Dribbling isn't a perfect feature either, as your character just kicks the ball out a long distance ahead and runs up to the ball. When not running, dribbling is simple, but dodging around opponents requires an odd flick of the circle pad that doesn't work consistently enough to use confidently.

Shooting is probably the worst, because of the limits imposed upon it, mainly that your characters can only move in one of eight directions. Why a soccer game released in 2015 has your character moving in only eight directions, we will never truly understand. Soccer is one of the most important sports for movement, and this restriction does nothing but hurt the game.


When a soccer game has nearly unplayable playing mechanics, it simply can't recover at all. Despite this low starting point, Soccer Up Online still manages to fall even lower than expected with the poor graphics. The graphics on hand may not be terrible, but they are simply rough and too basic. The developers were going for a cartoony theme, but it just comes off looking lazy and lacking of any detail. The characters on the field aren't even distinguishable from each other, unless you use a Mii.

The addition of Miis is a nice touch, one which makes great use of the properties of the 3DS, and actually adds a bit of personality to an otherwise flat game. Menus, sound effects, music and everything is just about as generic as possible, which does nothing to help Soccer Up Online to stand out from other soccer titles. The game looks incomplete, and even a little refinement would have gone a long way.


The main feature of Soccer Up Online would have to be the Online Soccer mode. This mode does meet the standards of being lag free, not too complex or having long loading times. Unfortunately, you likely won't want to go to the online mode once you've seen how poorly the game plays. It's a shame that the online works well but the game itself doesn't; it would have been better for the team to refocus the game into something more enjoyable than get it running online in this form.

Soccer Up Online doesn't do much for soccer fans on the eShop, unless they enjoy awkward movement and shooting mechanics. Gameplay comes first in sports games, and when the game is lacking in this department it never ends well. While the developers had good intentions bringing a multiplayer and lag-free soccer game to the eShop, they would have been better off refocusing their efforts on simply making the gameplay itself good.


Review copy provided by: Enjoy Up Games