Though it isn’t the best looking soccer game on the market, World Tour Soccer 2006 is definitely a step above last year’s game in terms of graphics. The franchise retains the solid color scheme that made the previous games look like cartoons, but the detail has improved greatly. Animations are better, but still not great. There is a definite rigid feel coupled with a distinct lack of gravity. Players will run around bolt upright until they dive around the field like Superman.

Audio commentary is still evolving in sports games; there isn’t any one game that does it perfectly. Most games suffer from serious delays from the commentators, especially in soccer games when a player shoots the ball. World Tour Soccer 2006 tries to remedy this by having the announcer scream out the name of the player who shoots the ball. An annoying solution, but the delay is certainly minimized. Their content is a bit lacking, though, and the only redeeming quality is their accents. The sound also suffers from slight pauses when something is being loaded. The sound effects bear this weight the most, as does the Euro pop soundtrack. The overall quality of the effects is good; it’s the execution that is lacking.

World Tour Soccer 2006 has a lot of options and no depth. Once you delve into one of these game modes, you won’t find the game of soccer; instead, a sloppy mess of idiot goalies, violent slide tackles, and generally poor gameplay. The A.I. relies solely on slide tackles to take the ball away from you, and most of them leave your player sprawled on the field as play continues around them. The physics are equally skewed; players with the ball seem to move as fast as those without it, and more than once you will witness the opposing players pass the ball around your player, only to sprint by and gain possession of it as you stand there and look silly.

What World Tour Soccer 2006 lacks in substance, it tries to make up for in numbers. There is a good arrangement of game modes to pick from. For quick games, the Exhibition mode satisfies. For longer endeavors, there are various Tournaments offered, as well as League, Season, and Career modes. The League mode lets you select around 20 teams of your choice and then pit them against each other in a mock league to see who the best team is. The Season mode is similar, but is an actual league from some part of the world. Club teams battle it out on the pitch for League dominance. The Career mode starts you out as a fledgling manager of a school team full of the worst players on the planet. You must play well enough to be considered for better leagues, and when you reach the pros, you gain money for your victories that allow you to purchase new players.

There is also a Challenge mode that monitors your skill as you play through a single game. Connected passes, successful tackles, and goals all earn you points, while playing poorly costs you points. After each game, you are given a password that you can (supposedly) enter on Sony’s website to win prizes. Yet that feature isn’t even on the site yet, if it is ever planned to be there, making Challenge mode lose its luster after you frantically search the site for a place to get your free stuff.

Playing a lot of games in these modes gives you tokens with which you can unlock certain goodies, like old teams and different sound effects. You’re going to be playing for a very long time though, since you’ll get around 15 tokens when you play through an entire tournament. The magnitude of the situation may become clear to you when you realize that a lot of the items cost hundreds of these tokens to unlock.

And last, but not quite least, the big new feature this year: the ability to slap a picture of your mug on players that you have created via the EyeToy. The process of converting your dashing good looks into a 3D model is a relatively simple one, but the amount of room it takes up on the memory card is pricey (more than 600KB). This leaves you with a packed card and also slows down the already painfully sluggish loading times before each game.

World Tour Soccer 2006 feels like it would be more at home in an arcade. The skills needed to master the game are easily developed in only a short amount of time, and once this very low level of perfection has been reached, there isn’t much more to learn. The A.I. isn’t the kind that forces you to use the advanced moves that can be found in the game. Instead, players will quickly find “shortcuts” around opposing players, like dribbling back and forth to make them slide tackle. You can almost go the entire field with one player and run the ball straight into the opposing net. Shooting is a bit too easy, and scores tend to be high, especially between two highly rated teams.

Going up against other soccer games on the market like Winning Eleven isn’t easy. However, it seems the arms race between the futbol games out there is seeing a widening gap between the pack leader and all others who are desperately trying to keep up. World Tour Soccer 2006 is one of those games that is being left in the dust, but not because of any one major flaw. Instead, this game suffers from various control issues whose negative effect on the game is bigger than the sum of its parts.

To start things off, the worst control sin of all time has been committed: the pass button is the same as the change-player button. This simple little combo disrupts the flow of gameplay at the worst times. As your player runs up to the ball and you want him to give an immediate pass, you will invariably press the pass button. However, since you don’t actually have the ball yet, you will switch control of the player, thus pulling the man closest to the ball off of it. Should there ever be a camp set up one day to teach people how to make good soccer games, this should be the case study to be scrutinized and learned by every student.

Other flaws of similar stripe include the awful fake dive ability. The fact that you can cheat in a sports game undermines the essence of making a game based on an established sport. If you include the ability to do something illegal in a sports game, you might as well make a fighting game. What will be next? Hidden shivs in the players’ socks? How about inciting riots in order to get the game thrown? If this Pandora’s box of cheating is left open, there will be no end to the steady decline of the World Tour Soccer franchise.

The one thing that World Tour Soccer 2006 got right are the little arrows that hug the sides of the screen telling you where your teammates are. These become an invaluable asset when the pace ramps up, but could have had a bigger impact had it not been for the shoddy passing system. In order to get a pass to a teammate, you have to aim the analog stick directly at him instead of the general area. Passes then end up going to completely different players or areas of the field than the destination intended. When one finally seems like its going to connect with the guy you wanted, the referee gleefully runs straight into the path of the ball and sends it careening in another direction.

Of all the soccer games on the market, World Tour Soccer 2006 is definitely the worst. I cannot find one good reason to purchase this game over any other in the genre. It has blatant flaws in almost every area, flaws that could have been avoided with a bit of research and some common sense. World Tour Soccer 2006 is definitely worse than last year’s game. and ranks down there with some of the worst soccer games of all-time.