UEFA Euro 2004 Portugal (PS2) > Reviews (1)

The games released in between the official yearly releases are never usually that good - i hope it's because they're testing new and awesome things for the later games, but that would still make paying full price for this a very unwise idea.

First of all, you can play international tournaments on previous games as well as league clubs, so you're actually losing out on what you can do compared to previous games. Although I believe there's teams available that you can't normally play as.

A quite cool feature is the inclusion of "Star player ability", which shows the best feature of the better quality players in the game. For example, Pavel Nedved's star player ability is dribbling and Jan Koller's star player ability is shooting. Sorry to only give Czech examples but I just love their team.

However, the commentary is just dreadful, as is everything else that you can hear in this game. EVERY throw-in you take the commentator says "he's opted for the long throw" or different variations of that, regardless of how far the ball goes. And the chants are just awful. Some of them don't even exist.

The graphics are very odd, they're not dreadful but everything seems a bit too dark. The crowd animations are terrible but to be fair there isn't a football game yet that has good crowd animations. However, there are many players whose faces have been animated for he first time. This was especially good for me as one of my favourite players is Sweden's Kim Kallstrom, and even though he looks more like Lurch from Addams family on this game, it's a start.

As for the game play, it's really not good. A tip: if you run up to the opposition and then sprint in a different direction when you're close to them you can take it past them EVERY time. You can't score outside the box either which is just stupid.

This game has put me off buying any of the subsequent mid-yearly releases and made me seriously think about the franchise. Really, I think they've used this game as a test for future releases so unless you can find this game for dirt cheap and just want to be annoyed every time the commentator claims you've thrown the ball long when you clearly haven't, then be my guest.