Players tire and need to be rested, for example. In addition to controlling your players on the pitch, you also can pick your formations, substitutions, and tactics.
The tournaments require more of a time investment and offer greater strategic depth. Exhibition matches can be set up in seconds and take only five minutes to complete-ideal for when you’re on the subway and want a quick game. The game has several modes-exhibition, penalty kicks, league, training, and cup-that allow players a varied level of gameplay. After training, I was averaging about two goals per five-minute match and had figured out that slide tackling the opposing goalie may be a sure way to earn a red card but it’s also incredibly fun.
The training mode is pretty helpful for mastering some of the game’s more subtle features, such as the “give-and-go” pass scheme. On defense, I often found the random switches irritating as I watched the opposing player dribble through my stationary players. One element I never got used to was how the computer dictates which player you control: you usually wind up taking over whichever player is closest to the ball. The controls utilize a pretty classic setup but it took me about three games to get used to the feel of the gamepad. It’s a really simple and clever way to incorporate the iPhone’s accelerometer into gameplay. In order to throw the ball in, you can tilt the iPhone to dictate where the ball will go, shaking the phone to throw the ball itself. But the real genius of the controls becomes evident when your team has to perform a throw-in. There are two buttons on the right-on offense, one button handles passing and the other is for shooting, while those buttons control stealing and slide tackling on defense. The controls are fairly intuitive-you control movement and the direction of the ball with a gamepad that appears in the bottom left corner during play.