The Ultimate Challenge is really fun, but where the real meat of the game comes in is the Treble Mode. In Treble Mode, you have one year to win your country’s top league, major domestic cup championship, and the UEFA championship all in the same year. This mode reminds me a lot of Sony’s NBA The Life series, and this year’s MLB The Show. You have certain objectives which need to be completed to advance throughout the year. Some of these objectives put you into a game that’s halfway completed and tells you to win, others do the same, but tells you, you need to score a certain number of goals, and others makes a certain player play a certain number of minutes to advance. Your screen has little news clips of the atmosphere in your country, and what certain people think of how the team is progressing, from fans, to the owner. There are blogs that help you figure out what your next objective is, and provide a little bit of a story line throughout your campaign.
The history book keeps track of your completed objectives, the amount of points you won, and what team you did them with, and allows you take all of the points you’ve earned and go to the shop to buy new gear, uniforms, and other goodies.
The game play is exceptional, with new quick controls that allow you to press one button to quickly take a corner kick, throw in or goal kicks to not bog down game play. The game play is incredibly fluid and fast paced, and after 5-10 min or so you can’t believe the game is already over. The AI is actually pretty good even on easy mode, and numerous times I found myself screaming at my defenders, or thanking God that I had gotten out of a jam. There are real time weather conditions, including winter effects, in which players are either wearing gloves, or allowing you to see their breath on the field.
Graphically the game is average at best, most of the camera angles are far away, and the backgrounds look like Madden backgrounds. The close-ups are pretty cool, that’s really where the graphics come into play, most of the players have life-like faces and nuances that you can pick out, but some look generic or almost fake. This is easily not EA’s best effort, and it’s pretty unacceptable in my opinion to have an average graphical game this far into the system’s lifespan. The music is pretty cool too…imagine Sting and Enya put together in most of the songs, and some of the songs are in another language to give it that European feel. Most of the songs are either French or Italian.
There is a mode only for the PS2 version that actually makes you play with up to seven friends via the multi-tap. It’s called the UEFA Champions League Lounge and it allows the player to invite up to seven friends with bragging rights, leader board finishes up for grabs, plus the ability to unlock even more content playing in this mode. There is also a PSP Link where you can take your saved season and transferring it to the PSP to play while you’re on the go.
If you like soccer and are obsessed with UEFA pick this game up. Graphically the game could have been better, and the controls take some getting used to, but other than that, this is a solid title, and with the PSP Link feature you can take your season on the go, which I really like.
