Sociable Soccer ’25 – PS5 Review 1

Sociable Soccer ’25 is an arcade football game which has a genuine lineage that traces back to not only one of the best football games of all time but one of the best games generally, Sensible World of Soccer.  If you were gaming in the ’90s, there’s a good chance you lost countless hours to SWOS on the Amiga, we know we did.  And when that game’s lead designer, Jon Hare, decided to get back into making football games, we couldn’t have been more excited.  We even got the chance to meet him and play a very early build of the game.

Sociable Soccer first showed up in Early Access back in 2017 and has had a few versions since but this year’s version is the first to make it across to consoles and so now we get to play it properly.  Although it’s pretty apparent that the game isn’t too interested in making life easy for you when it comes to understanding what’s going on.

The main menu offers up a few modes and here you can play friendlies, all manner of real-life cups and leagues or you can drop into the main meat of the game, the Career Mode.  Here you’ll get to pick you manager avatar from a selection of well-drawn but very cartoony characters, and your team.  There are one thousand teams to pick from, which is very much the old SWOS way of doing things, and so we picked QPR.  Albeit now known as QPK and also ‘London Hoops’ because of licensing.   And you’ll start with a team of random nobodies (make your own ‘just like QPR then!’ jokes) although weirdly we did somehow have QPR’s Lucas Andersen in our team.  It’s things like this that are initially really confusing.  And, oh boy, does that get worse.

So, you’ve got your team.  The next thing to do is upgrade it.  Well, unlike SWOS, where you’d just delve into the transfer market looking for bargains, there’s none of that here.  All you can do is upgrade players individually.  There are two ways, one is by doing well on the pitch.  Although this is odd.  At the end of a match, the game picks a ‘man of the match’ and boosts their EXP level.  Great.  Except this seems to be utterly random.  We’ve had a striker score four in a 4-0 win and not be man of the match, we had a winger be man of the match when we barely ever play down the wings and so he wouldn’t have really had an impact on the game, we’ve had goalies and defenders get it despite us absolutely dominating possession and being camped in the final third.  So that whole thing makes very little sense.

The other way to upgrade players though is to do it in the menus by essentially feeding other players in your squad to them.  This removes the lesser player and gives your upgraded player a little boost.  How this affects individual stats is unclear, he just gets better in a way that slightly pushes up his overall rating.  The game makes you do this at least once before you get to start your first match.

Anyway, at this point you’re ready to go.  We were confused as our first game was against an Italian side rather than another Championship one.  We assumed this was a friendly or something but it wasn’t.  But after the usual football game pre-amble, you’ll find yourself at kick-off and initially we were a bit disappointed.  Sure, this is arcade-y football as we remember it with fast passing, hyper-aggressive tackling (honestly, each sliding tackle is like its own war crime) and floaty-light physics.  Your players glide around, covering metres with their tackling and generally feeling a bit weightless.  And the movement of the football felt a bit ‘off’ somehow.   Like it can be absolutely punted so that it travels like a meteor entering our atmosphere but then slows down quickly.  The physics just felt a bit weird but that is to be expected when transitioning from either FIFA (or EA FC or whatever) or eFootball (which we played A LOT for the last two years before eventually sacking it off a few months back because of Konami’s bullshit).

You get the feeling of playing one of those Nintendo football games.  Super-fast matches, over-the-top action, celebrations where real-life lumpy defenders are suddenly able to do backflips and plenty of cartoony imagery when it comes to your avatar and the referees.  And, well, we weren’t into it.  Never mind, let’s get through it.  But as the game is so bad at explaining things, we ended up looking at the trophies to see what else we could do.  And that’s where we found a trophy for playing with the overhead camera view (there are two of them actually but the trophy only unlocks with #2 not #5 as is typical of this game’s weirdness).

And suddenly we were in business.  Look, we don’t really want to play a simplified version of FIFA or eFootball.  Football games evolved into their final form years ago and playing some exaggerated, watered-down version just isn’t going to cut it in 2025.  But put it in a top-down view (a’la Sensible Soccer) and now we’re in.  Now the game makes sense.  It works better, it plays better.  The feel of it is improved.  It feels like a modern, console version of Sensible Soccer.  Sure, you’ve now got extra buttons to think about (Sensi was all done with a stick and one button) from passing, chipping (which is everything from a long, lofted pass to a tidy dink over the keeper), shooting, switching players and sprinting.  It’s a bit more to consider but it works well.  We had hoped to reconfigure the controls but couldn’t.  Of course, we later found an option to swap the chip/shoot buttons buried in a menu.  Again, nothing is all that intuitive here.  But we’d gotten used to the controls by then.

Playing on the default ‘Medium’ difficulty doesn’t really present any challenges.  To this point we’ve never lost a game on Medium.  But playing on Hard is a lot tougher.  We still managed to win the World Cup on Hard on our first attempt but we did lose a group match, go to penalties twice (although in true SWOS fashion you can’t control your goalies during penalties which is ridiculous in 2025) and steal the final with two very late goals.  And, boy, did that feel good!  We definitely got some of that Sensi dopamine from that.

There are quirks though.  It’s surprisingly easy to score from 40+ yards out.  Just hit the chip button, hold it for more power and watch the goalkeeper fumble it.  The goalies are absolutely awful in this game.  Getting slide-tackled from behind when one-on-one with the keeper won’t even result in a free kick 99% of the time.  It’s kind of nostalgic but things weren’t done this way in the ’90s on purpose.  It was because they didn’t know how to do it better.  Times have moved on.

So, you’ve played your first match and so it’s back into the squad stuff.  Our next match was also against an Italian side.  What is going on?  Has the game put QPR into Serie A for some reason?  Well, no.  Eventually you realise you can be matched against any team.  This isn’t a league structure (despite you starting in Division 10).  You’re playing against other players’ teams.  Not other players.  Just their squads.  Some guy will be playing against my version of QPR (QPK/whatever).  Win enough games and you’ll get promoted.  Although (again weirdly) if you don’t manage to get promoted in a season, never mind.  You’ll still keep your progression and will just go up next season anyway.  Okay, cool I guess.

Along the way you’ll gain new players.  Some of these will be slightly better nobodies but occasionally you’ll end up with a real player from your chosen team.  At this point we’ve got half a dozen QPR players in our team.  Despite that we’re winning (although well done the Rs for beating Oxford last night!).  It’s just all a bit odd.  Does this mean that QPR can never have any top tier players?  The whole joy of SWOS was us taking Mansfield or someone from Division Four to the heights of Europe while signing the likes of Gullit, Baresi, original Ronaldo and whatever other Galactico we could afford.  This new way of doing things seems a bit rubbish if we’re being honest.

And there’s other bits of weirdness.  You’ve got a ‘MyTeam’ rating which is improved by earning ‘Kudos’ in ‘Club Clash’ matches.  Of course, the game does nothing to explain this (we found it in the trophies) and buries this nonsense deep in a sub-menu somewhere.  And even when we found it, we had no idea what it meant or how to do it.  It turned out that a Club Clash is when your team is pitted against a specific other team (in our case Maastricht).  We randomly drew them in the season, beat them and suddenly were told we’d had a Club Clash and had earned some of that Kudos.  Took a while to get there though.  Again, nothing’s intuitive and none of it is better than just having a regular SWOS career with regular transfer systems.  It all feels like what it is, a game designed originally for iOS (although, thankfully, there are no in-app purchases to worry about).

Also puzzling is the online aspect of the game.  You’re playing against real peoples’ teams and there’s a basic communication system for sending over preset reactions when things happen in game.  But there’s no actual online play.  You can’t actually play another human unless they’re sat on your sofa.  It’s so odd.  The game presents itself like an online-focused game and yet it’s not.  It’s just so odd.

The presentation is also a mixed bag.  The game looks pretty good.  Sure, it’s an arcade-y, simple look but it’s bright, cheery and reasonably well-detailed.  Usually the crowds are what let down cheaper football games but here everything looks alright.  Although you don’t see a lot of that when you go to the top-down view.  Sure, the animation is a bit simple and those goal celebrations are a bit childish but it’s okay.  The players don’t look anything like their real-life counterparts but who cares?

The audio’s not great though.  During matches you’ve got really dead crowds, no commentary and the thing you hear most of all are the grunts from the players.  It honestly sounds like playing five-a-side with your work colleagues rather than having any excitement or power to it.  And, also, there are broken trophies at the moment too.  Bit annoying being one of the three best QPR players this week and not getting the trophy for it.  Hmph!

So, yes, a lot of criticism.  Sociable Soccer ’25 gets so much wrong and it’s all so baffling.  But it’s fun.  It’s really fun.  Again, we would have hated it if it just had that default camera view but when played top-down we really enjoy it.  There’s the potential for such a better game here but we’re not sure that’ll ever happen this far into Sociable Soccer’s development.  That’s like asking Konami to put a proper Master League into eFootball.  But there’s still a ton of enjoyment to be had out of what is here.