Kick off
Soccer is something that you either hate or love, I belong to the former group. It’s probably because of this that I don’t like games based on soccer as well but kick off is an exception. Kick off isn’t the usual soccer game in that the action can be fast and furious unlike the real thing where sometimes you can play a 90 minute game without a single goal being made by either side.
You can select from several wellknown countries like Brazil, Italy and England in the league competition but you can also play a single match where you can select the skill of the players from international to sunday league. The skill modifier only changes the speed of the players so you can run around faster. The game is played from a birdseye view and the field is very large so the game will scroll in every direction to follow the ball. Each side begins with 11 players, one goalkeeper and ten in the field. The field players can be set in three different positions, forward or striker, midfielder and defender. You can select the positions from four predefined formations but you can only do this at the start of the game and at halftime.
At the highest level the players run around very fast and you require some serious skills to keep the ball in your possesion. You can’t really dribble the ball but when you run you always kick the ball a small distance in front of you which makes it easier for attackers to take the ball away from you. This take some getting used to but once you get the hang of you realize this makes for a far faster game than other soccer games.
As far as soccer games are concerned this game may not be very accurate as a simulator but people who aren’t really interested in soccer will find that this is far more fun to play especially with two players. The amige version in particular is excellent with smooth scrolling and fast gameplay so if you’d like to check it out I’d recommend that version.
Overal rating: 7/10
This game was released for several different systems here are some notes:
| Amiga | Released in 1989. Game has been tested but not completed with winUAE v0.9.91. Good scrolling, some nice sound effects and good controls make this the best version. |
| Amstrad CPC | Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed with winAPE v2.0 A6. Has only monochrome graphics and there is no real sense of scrolling because only the edges of the field move. |
| Atari ST | Released in 1989. Game has been tested but not completed with Steem v3.2. Graphics might look similar at first but the screen doesn’t really scroll and the effect is simulatated by moving two different colors. It’s hard to explain but simply put it doesn’t look good. |
| C64 | Released in 1989. Game has been tested but not completed with CCS64 v2.0 win. The only version to scroll horizontally instead of vertically, this doens’t really change the gameplay though and plays about the same as the others. |
| NES | Released in 1991 by Imagineer. There are some graphical artifacts but on different emulators it worked ok. |
| SNES | Released in 1992 by Imagineer. This version seems to have some extra options but otherwise it’s basically the same. |
| ZX Spectrum | Released in 1989. Game has been tested but not completed with emuZwin v2.5. Pretty much identical to the amstrad version. |
| Date added | Dec-25-2004 13:44 |
| Name | Kick off |
| Developer | Dino Dini |
| Publisher | Anco |
| First released | 1989 |
| Genre | Sport |
