In Academy of Champions, you’ll play as a new recruit who has joined the academy run by soccer legend Pele. You’ll be able to play as either a boy or girl and your quest in the game is to assemble the best possible soccer team.

There are 30 possible recruits to choose from that can join your team and it won’t be as simple as just asking them to join. You’ll have to meet certain requirements in order to get someone to join. For instance, there’s a character that won’t join your team unless you have a couple of girls in your starting lineup.

This is a soccer game so enough about the story! Hit the break to find out how Academy of Champions handles.

Academy of Champions (Wii)
Developer: Ubi Vancouver
Publisher: Ubisoft
To be released: September 2009

The controls are pretty straight forward. Press A to pass or tackle, shoot at the goal with B, Z is used to dodge on offense and sprint on defense and C will switch your control to a different player.

As you pass your ball to your teammates, a special meter will fill up. Once it’s filled up all the way, players will shake the Wiimote and your character will perform a special move. I was playing with the Ubisoft team made up of Jade, The Prince, Altair, Sam Fischer and Rayman and each special is unique to the player. Sam’s special is just pure awesome. Everything turns dark, Sam’s goggles turn on and he sneaks his way to the goal to score. The special attacks will always score a goal so make sure to pass that ball a lot! Using your sprint drains the super meter so it's not going to be simple to abuse your special.



The Wii MotionPlus attachment also works with Academy of Champions and gives players one extra special move that they can use. The Balance Board is good to use too, but it’s just used for the games 14 mini-games. There will be two-player local multiplayer as well.

Overall, I really liked Academy of Champions. It’s one of those games where I don’t ever see myself buying it, but I’ll totally play it if it’s in a friends console. The art style is very fitting and the controls work pretty good.

One thing that I found annoying though was that I had to cycle through my entire team a lot of the times in order to get to my player that was closest to the soccer ball. The game should automatically throw you to your player that’s closest to the ball when the opposing team has it.

You only have four characters that you can cycle through on your team so it’s a pretty minor complaint. The game is promising a lot of replay value with all of the unlockables. There’s going to be about 20 hours worth of gameplay too, which is surprising for what this game is. If you’re into arcade soccer games, then this will definitely be worth the purchase.