Review: World Soccer Strikers '91 – PS5, PS4

World Soccer Stinkers ’21

World Soccer Strikers ’91 is awful. The game is, according to the developers, a “physics-based” arcade football game – or soccer, if you put syrup on your bacon – and it’s supposed to be reminiscent of the old arcade footy games. It isn’t. I remember playing football games in the arcade when I was a kid and they were easy to play and fun, too.

Game Information
Release Date: August 20th, 2021
Developer: Bipolar Dawn
Publisher: Meteorbyte
Availability: PSN (Digital)

World Soccer Strikers ’91 is not fun nor is it easy to play. The developer boasts that the game doesn’t have any assist and you’ll have to pass, dribble, and shoot without any help. In other words, they’ve made a game so poor and annoying, your only hope at scratching some fun out of it is if you take a shot of the hardest liquor you’ve got every time you fail to perform the simplest of actions. I’d have died of alcohol poisoning before the end of the first game.

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The controls are basic but they’re not friendly in the slightest. The ball, as noted by the developer, does not stick to the feet of the player in possession. This makes dribbling almost impossible, and by that measure, playing anything resembling football is also almost impossible.

Instead, what you get are a bunch of fat-head sprites running across a small pitch while a football gets knocked around, seemingly by accident. On the few times that I actually did score, they were complete flukes. On one occasion, the game actually scored for me. I didn’t press anything but my player knocked in a screamer. That’s the good news, then – the game plays itself so you don’t have to.

The game has a few modes to play with and there are plenty of teams, each with different stats that determine how they’ll play on the field – not that the stats actually matter, because no matter which team you play as, it’s a miserable experience all the same.

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The only highlight I can think of is in the team names and the in-game versions of real-life managers. Jurgen Klopp, the German Liverpool manager is called “Gegenpress” which is in reference to his preferred counter-play tactics. This is the height of the game’s creativity. That’s not a good thing.

World Soccer Strikers ’91 is just plain bad. I can’t recommend it, even to those who spent all of their pocket money feeding arcade machines. This won’t bring back happy memories.

Review Disclaimer: This review was carried out using a copy of the game provided by the publisher. For more information, please read our Review Policy.

Primary version tested: PS4. Reviewed using PS5.