Sensible Soccer 2006

Yet for all its strength in accessibility, Sensi's ultimately a bit of a shadow of itself. You can forgive the lack of growth in gameplay - this is a new audience, after all - but you can't forgive the roughness around the edges. The lack of half-time stats, the way the ball sometime snaps to goalkeeper animations when fired at them, and the painful lack of online options, which surely would have elevated this whether it made substantive gains on its predecessors or not. Load times, particularly on PS2 and Xbox, are surprising, the front end is a bit rubbish and I could come up with better sound effects by banging a microphone against a wall. Finally, the lack of widescreen support is particularly woeful.

You must learn control

On the PC in particular, controlling the players can get interesting. The arrow keys can obviously be combined into eight different directions - but this affords less flexibility and nuance than an analogue stick. Shooting with the keys is particularly difficult, since you can only whack the ball straight in front of you and diagonally at forty-five degrees, which is a bit of a pain. Although the old Sensi only had eight-way control, it didn't feel as bad as this, as far as we can remember.

If you're interested in playing on the PC rather than the Xbox or PS2, we'd definitely advising finding a gamepad somewhere with an analogue stick.

Final thoughts

Sensi's charm is its simplicity, but its execution can be a bit lacking. The pace isn't up to old standards, and although you can score some fantastic goals, just as many scramble randomly over the line - and you're more likely to react with surprise than excitement when you score half of them. Granted, it's not worth getting too het up about some of this stuff, particularly given that a lot of places are asking as little as 15 notes for this. And it's an ideal adrenalin-sink for you and your mates in the aftermath of whichever game it is your lot eventually crash out of - particularly next to the slothful FIFA or the brilliant but undeniably complicated PES. But Sensible Soccer used to be worth playing for hours in a row. It had roguish charm but intoxicating depth. Sensible Soccer 2006 has a bit of both, but nowhere near as much.