Nintendo Pocket Football Club Review

Nintendo Pocket Football Club’s title is quite deceiving. You’d think those four words would denote a videogame that would have you punting a ball around a turfed pitch; running around like a fool with your 3DS in the air every time you struck the back of the net with a perfect strike of the ball. Well you won’t do any of that… you’ll just watch it instead.

This download-only title has more in common with the Football Manager series than it does with games that, you know, actually let you play digital football. Obviously, if you’re not playing matches, you’re doing something, and in this case, it’s managing your team. Nintendo Pocket Manager would have been a much more apt title.

Cue your arrival to a quaint little pixel village, where your career as a manager begins. After designing your teams’ strip and name, you’ll make your way to the local stadium to train your squad up in friendly and practice matches. Other than differences in duration, both match types are essentially identical, giving you access to training cards - the only thing stopping you from just skipping time and proceeding straight to league fixtures.

Developer Paritybit have sadly missed a trick here, as the core mechanic of Pocket Football is training your squad to become better competitors. The problem is, doing so relies on a heavily watered-down mechanic - one that takes a few minutes at best each time you earn random training cards from matches - that offers little opportunity for customisation other than deciding which player needs beefing up the most.

You can tinker with smaller details, like team formation, substitutes and tactics to increase your chances of success too -  even if doing so sometimes feels inconsequential to the outcome of any given match. The features would work well if it weren’t for the fact that you’re forced to watch every single match that your team plays.

This is by far the worst aspect of Pocket Football Club and, other than artificially prolonging the game’s life, there’s little reason to not be able to skip them, as in all honesty, they’re about as much fun to sit through as watching old paint peel off a wall (not watching it dry, that’s probably more entertaining than watching sprites barely resembling humans judder across the screen like the Tinman from Wizard of Oz).

Your ultimate goal is to reach League One (apparently the be all and end all of tournaments) and become the best of the best, leaving your losing opponents to feed the grass by weeping salty tears all over the pitch. You can make substitutes and change team tactics at the halftime whistle of each match, providing some opportunity for input whilst you observe, but again, these are all features that could be present without having to subject your brain to the boredom of viewing each game.

The tweaks and changes you make between each fixture are what keep Pocket Football even remotely interesting, and being able to buy new players and trade your own with friends helps to add incentive to keep you playing, but at the end of the day, this Football Manager-lite title is marred by poor design choices and oversimplification. After all, if you wanted to watch a football match, you could just, you know, watch a real one on the goggle box. Pocket Football isn’t terrible, it’s just not particularly great, and there’s far better examples out there that do what Paritybit have attempted to much greater effect.