There are five modes on offer, including player mode, exhibition, competition, training and Team Edit. Player mode is where the main game lies for the single player experience. You’ll start off by creating your character with a large variety of options including hair, eyes and body proportions. There are literally hundreds of possible combinations for you to make, though once you start playing matches and taking part in training sessions, the hard work you put into your character’s appearance doesn’t show up too well on the field, rendering the feature almost useless. Regardless, the game runs on a week-by-week basis with an official match played every three months.
During this time, you’ll have to balance several aspects of your character’s training, health and social life. Firstly, there are different types of training that improve your usual speed, power and dribbling abilities, but in particular there's an emphasis on training with your fellow team mates. By doing so, the team builds a greater level of trust towards one another, making training sessions more productive.
Training is played out in the form of short mini-games, and is used to increase your character’s skill level, increasing their performance on field. Each mini-game requires you to meet certain objectives, including not allowing the opposing side to get possession of the football under a certain amount of time, and scoring goals. The more points you score in training sessions, the higher the difficulty will become, however redundancy doesn’t take too long to follow this. Fortunately, at times the game will cut you some slack and automatically allocate a skill level increase, skipping the session.
We can see a pile-up happening here.
As with any great athlete, injuries and general tiredness are likely to follow due to training, resulting in a rest period being needed. There are various treatments for your physical and mental health at the hospital, and if you like you can take the R&R time at home. Mental health, one of the more complex features in the game, plays a key role in your ego and motivation bars. Whenever you receive a pep talk from the coach or praise yourself in front of the media, your motivation and ego usually increases. At the same time, if you choose to party non-stop with mates, your ego will decrease. Let your ego get too high or low, and your team will start to notice you’re not acting like your normal self. Eventually you’ll be ordered to rest for 12 weeks, although for some reason we still managed to play through training sessions and main matches despite the doctor telling us this. Motivation, like in real life, effects your performance and determines how much you’ll level up by. It will decrease when you perform badly in mini-games or lose a match.
It's important to keep all training and health aspects in balance as well as maintain a reasonable social status. This is beneficial for your character, as the rewards of trust and friendship between team mates is essential for better practice sessions and match wins. If a team mate comes up to you asking for help, it’ll do you favours to listen and help them out rather than simply pass them onto someone else. Occasionally though, it’s not about the team - it’s about you. You’ll have the option to go on a shopping spree and buy goods such as TVs, jewellery and even a brand new house. But it’ll take a while before you can spare the money on the latter items as you’re tied to an annual salary, and only when you take up better offers from the opposition can you start going wild. Even then, you have to take into account medical costs and other future costs; otherwise, you can expect to be in a bit of a pickle for the remainder of the year.
While managing your lifestyle is a pretty decent feature, the main reason why gamers would buy Virtua Pro Football in the first place is to live the dream and play a real game of football. Sadly, this is where the game’s shortcomings become glaringly obvious. First of all, the game selects the player closest to the ball for you to control and while you’re trying to get the ball off your opponent, it will often switch to another player. It is uncomfortable to say the least and on many occasions, the player selected isn’t entirely in the best position for you to do anything worthwhile, such as having you foolishly trying to catch up with an opponent who’s a good few feet away from you. The game offers a secondary selection with a tap of the L1 button, which redeems the problem slightly, but generally this is more of a nuisance than a solution as the same problems quickly reoccur.
The art of scoring goals is also tricky, as it's difficult to pinpoint an accurate shot during a run, and often you’ll miss by a long distance or overpower your shots. Free kicks are even worse, as they carry on the automated selection process. When your team is allowed a free kick, you’re taken to a tactic selection screen where you can pick one of four different offences, which decide whether or not you’ll kick to a second player or go for a direct free-kick. When you choose to pass to another player, the camera changes from a bird’s eye view and goes behind your players. You then kick the ball and the game selects the receiving player, while the camera switches back to the bird’s eye view. This all happens so quickly you have little time to react and as such, your goal attempt usually fails.
We must become number one on the North side.
If all this wasn’t enough, at times the game still tells the player where to run (despite telling you you’re in control of said player). This mainly occurs when the ball is out of possession, and is at a distance from you, and while you would naturally do this regardless, there’s no excuse for the CPU to continue running to the ball when the opposition is about to grab it, pass it and go for goal. To get an idea of how bad this is, you can play multiplayer by yourself and watch as player 2 magically comes to life and takes possession of the ball. Unless the second controller is haunted, there’s no reason why this should happen. There's too much AI interference.
The exhibition and competition modes are virtually the same, except exhibition allows you to quickly select a team and an opponent for a quick game of football, while competition mode is more refined, having you select a team and attempt to win a league cup. Not up to scratch when facing off against the opposition? Training mode is your answer, in that it provides you with a variety of options, including general passing and shooting exercises, as well as a 1-on-1 practice session. Much to our dismay, the training mini-games in player mode are also available for practice at your leisure.
Team Edit is a basic editing program that allows you to switch and change team player listings. However, there’s as much fun to be had here as there is when creating your own player. If you’re tired of a particular team’s logo, you can go right ahead and change it to feature a plain blue diamond shape or something Da Vinci himself would be proud of. You can even go as far as changing the stitching and number fonts on uniforms.
Multiplayer support for up to four players via the Multi-tap is included in the package, and is reproduced as full-screened gameplay. There’s nothing in particularly unique with multiplayer, except you can decide to play with or against each other. It actually feels a little tacked-on and as a result, when friends come over you’re more than likely to ignore Virtua Pro Football completely.
Trip him!
Graphically, the menu layout and a cel-shaded introduction FMV are the only things that stand out. When you’re playing a game, players are shrunken down to ant-sized beings, making it virtually impossible to tell them apart. Player models are very basic when viewed up close, leaving Virtua Pro Football behind some of the more advanced games on the market.
The audio proportion of the game is virtually the same. The menu and introduction FMV sequence shows where the game’s audio budget has been spent. Poor work has been done on the cheers and chants of the crowds, who seem to lack different chants and cheers. The commentator sounds as if he’s ready for retirement, as he doesn’t get overly enthusiastic about the match and passes an identical comment about the match every five minutes. Players never speak to each other - instead text and their lips moving signifies speech.
Die-hard football fans will get the most out of Virtua Pro Football as it offers a lot of depth in maintaining the life of a player and has a wide variety of editing options to customise teams and people to your liking. The game just falls short when you’re on the field, and doesn’t have anything that will stack up against higher-end football games.
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