Virtua Striker has one thing going for it and it’s the graphical package. The game is overall simply bright, beautiful, and colorful. Character animations are fluid, and the models themselves are very detailed complete with facial emotion animation. The stadiums are also detailed well, with a nicely animated crowd to boot. What are lacking here are the weather effects. Where is it written that every day is a sunny day on the soccer field? Umm...rarely? The omission of rain and snow really effect the overall presentation, as it’s fun to see players kick up the dirt and mud and just get filthy as hell. Not in this game though my friends. You get “sesame street” sunny days complete with the ever impressive lens flare effects, and that is it. Even with the lack of weather, the game still looks brilliant and is the game’s stand out feature.

Audio is fair to bad with an oddly absent commentary cast, and ho-hum sound FX. Even the crowd sounds dull and uninspired. Nothing here that hasn’t been done before and better from the folks at EA.

Gameplay is where I began to scratch my head. The game plays okay, but the controls seem to be just a half step behind, as if lag was occurring. I checked to make sure I wasn’t online, but I then remembered that feature has yet to be represented on the Cube, so I was once again stumped. On top off all that, no speed burst button is available to get those nice breakaway plays. What’s up with that? I know this game is based on an arcade game, but surely a turbo or speed burst button was available there? The game also feels a little too simplistic for my taste. Even for an arcade game it’s basic. This is the game’s biggest flaw, which hurts the score dramatically. Not that the game plays poorly - just unresponsive and that takes getting used to.

The game does have a wealth of great options. Beyond the Road to the International Cup, you have a mass amount of teams to choose and even edit if you wish. And to get the poor timing down the game even offers an extensive training mode. What the game doesn’t offer is 4-player support. Why, oh why not? This is the Game Cube right? The system does offer 4 player support right? Looks like someone really dropped the “soccer” ball on this one. This also hurt the score as well as it took half of the multiplayer fun out...and that just can’t happen on a system that is built for 4 players.

All in all I feel that Virtua Striker has some good points, but a lot of bad ones need some serious ironing if this series is ever going to be taken seriously. Nice first effort, and easily a rental or a buy in the bargain bin…but full price? Never.