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.