Written by: Rik
Date posted: July 5, 2020
If you search for ‘Kick Off 3’, odds are you’ll get results for European Challenge. But there was a separate, and reasonably different prior release, and after wondering for some time whether I’d imagined it, my most recent searches bore some fruit, and a download (from one of those dirty great big download sites I was slagging off in the main review).
I gave it a quick blast and aside from being mildly bothered by a graphical glitch (evident from the screenies below) it was interesting to compare it with the later release. Instead of being a mildly more polished version of the same thing but with the addition of club teams, as I had assumed, the differences are rather more significant.
As mentioned in the main review, this version has only international teams but features real (and not misspelled) player names. Graphically it looks marginally less impressive, but there are at least black players in this version, and not in European Challenge, which is certainly a strange thing to actively remove.
On the pitch, it more closely resembles a side-on version of earlier Kick Off titles, with more freestyle dribbling and shooting. Shots have quite a good chance of going in and matches soon descend into high-scoring free-for-alls. European Challenge certainly tidies this up, but by imposing the same tricks employed by many other titles to keep scoring down, making the ‘keepers harder to beat under most circumstances and less likely to parry the ball.
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