Tired of getting sand in your eyes while playing soccer on the beach? Well, publishers Wanadoo (in Europe) and Dreamcatcher (in North America) have the solution for your problem, and its called Pro Beach Soccer. Developed by newcomers PAM, Pro Beach Soccer promises lush outdoor beach environments, slamming soundtrack, hot babes and a fresh and amazing soccer experience. Sounds good so far doesn’t it? So let’s see if the game delivers what it promises, shall we?



Graphics:

Not bad. Not bad at all. You get to choose to play in different locations, with every arena having its own personal touch. How about playing at the beach in Marseille, France? Or what about the inner-city of Bangkok? The players in the game also look well done, with every player having his own unique model, accompanied by fluid looking motion capture. With that said, the sand effects could have been done somewhat better, and the particle effects look a bit daft to say the least.

The crowd in the game actually looks decent: if you're about to score they stand up in excitement and best of all they don’t look like paper cuttings as they tend to do in most other sports games. All in all the graphics are not very impressive but they work well most of the time.



Sound:

The music is a nice blend of hip hop and techno beats that fit well in the game, it is used sparsely though and the only time you can hear it is in the menus and between matches, which is probably a good decision since the songs are more like 20 second long loops that could have became really repetitive.

The sound design is decent, but nothing spectacular. A nice feature is that the commentator speaks the language of the location where the arena you’re playing at is located. It’s just too bad that he doesn’t have many lines to say and gets extremely repetitive and annoying after only a short while; thank you PAM for adding an option to make him shut up.



Gameplay:

This is where this game fails, and it fails terribly. The controls are so slow and sluggish, they almost make you fall asleep while you’re playing; also the AI is poorly programmed, resulting in your teammates almost constantly just standing still and doing absolutely nothing. Same goes for enemy players however, they seem rather confused and don't adjust themselves to your playing style.

The game modes that can be played are friendly, arcade and championship and you can pick lots of countries from all over the world. You have a couple of nice moves to perform such as the bicycle kick, but it's way too hard to execute them with the poor controls. There is absolutely no excuse for the poor game play, nor anything else in the game that can make up for it


Multiplayer:

The game also supports 4 players at the same time, but its not really as fun as it might sound, because the slow speed of the game kills the whole experience and there isn’t really any skill to scoring goals because the goalie: AI reacts the same all the time and falls for the same tactics over and over again.

Conclusion:

A good concept with major design flaws, despite that the game could have been more polished overall This is the kind of game that SEGA would have done right, so hopefully we will see some kind of beach soccer game from them soon. I'd advise you to give the game a try first if soccer is your type of game, everyone else should stay as far away from this as possible.