I bought it!
I played two leagues so far. Got many 7-0 and some 8-0. One tie and two losses (against a team from a higher league which I just could not beat). Basically because you start with significantly better players than the other teams except for one or two per league. Each turn is 2 minutes, so there are about 22 moves per half and 46 moves per game. You normally can score in 2-3 moves with a better team (if dice go your way, and the computer will play two to three moves normally (sometimes it plays one) so I think the upper number of goals would be 22 (11 per team, theoretical maximum under perfect rolls and worst AI defensive behavior). With high level teams it would be much less, since skills favor the defense, and rolls won’t go only one way, to the point that seeing more than 3 goals would be indeed rare.
Overall I’m liking it, but I don’t think it will have too much staying power with me. Definitely not a substitute for Blood Bowl. I dislike the turn structure. It feels, for lack of a better word, too “mobile” for me. having so few moves makes each goal much less satisfying, since its rare you get to play more than 6 moves on the attack in a row. So plays are short term and lack weight. This is nice, and definitely a thoughtful design, but not for me. It also makes each individual match too meaningless (it’s all about the campaign, which you need to play more than a hundred of similar matches to beat), and I find the campaign incredibly uncompelling (I dislike soccer) and samey by necessity. It has the rhythm of a Footbal Manager (makes sense :) )
The way stats are calculated I think does not do the game any favors. It’s a pure percentile system (with some mods), so a player with twice the stats has about 75% chances over the other player, leading to huge imbalances that are difficult to compensate for because you have so few moves on a row (you can at most use 2 moves to setup a third -unless you use skills). This all means teams with better players steamroll lesser teams and it’s not fun playing on either side. Specifically, defense is too strong if too high over the other team, and because you can’t move that much there’s no real way to maneuver without skill checks being triggered (that you lose if you are the lesser team). And the game has no real catch-up mechanism (think inducements in Blood Bowl). It’s also too granular, giving the same feedback on a 35 vs 30 matchup as between a 25 vs 75 matchup (with has chances of 84% towards the 75 player).
As others have said, I really like how important the special abilities of the players are. The whole system is strangely divided in two parts. Players have a special ability and hidden stats given by their position on the field (increases with XP to an specialization), and players also have regular stats that increase through XP (but a different kind of XP, think FFT and the difference between XP and Job Points). That means the ability to customize your players is very limited and slow (you can’t mix and match that much, at least yet). But that’s ok. It’s a good system that makes special abilities important, and the abilities match the theme and feel powerful. Problem is the interface is “no good” and as far as I know the only special ability you can see (but not check what it does) in the match interface is the non-positional one. For the positional abilities it seems you have to remember them? The visual aspect of the game (theme + feedback) is the least appealing part of the game, I think.
Anyway, it’s a tactics-lite game that has a lot of good decisions thrown in, but it really favors the campaign management (soccer team management) over the tactical aspect, which as well designed as it is (much more than the campaign) is used in a throwaway manner (it even allows you to skip matches and just keep the computer calculated results, which says a lot). And it really stick to the theme of soccer, to an extent that I find it detrimental (but other might really, really enjoy).
