Soccer Knockout Review

Playing Keepie Uppie is not an easy thing to do. Once upon a time, as a child, I was a keen if very average soccer player and my skills were very limited. Soccer Knockout has done a fairly good job of capturing the difficulty involved in keeping a ball in the air at all times. That makes for a challenging but not consistently enjoyable experience at times.

Using one's fingers to deftly flick the ball around, players are asked to choose their team and work their way through a tournament full of challenges and competition. A tutorial guides players through the basics but practice really does make perfect here. Tapping on the screen helps one keep the ball in the air, while a flick causes them to kick it at a target. Aiming is the trickiest thing of all and things soon turn quite frantic.

At times it's quite awkward to juggle the ball as well as line up a shot, which is unfortunate as shots are key to success. To win a game, players have to negotiate a series of obstacles usually involving walls or ramps, kicking the ball around them then catching up. It's not an easy task by any means but it's occasionally worth sticking at for those moments when everything gels together at last.

What's far from fair though are the times when the ball simply gets stuck somewhere on screen, unable to roll back towards you and leaving no other option than to restart the match. Such physics based issues really don't help matters.

There's a nice idea behind Soccer Knockout but it's a little too tricky to be truly satisfying for any but the most dedicated of players. Still as a finger based example of how tricky the game of Keepie Uppie is, it does a reasonable job.