CPU players are often seen to turn back and forth on the spot as if confused, but at high speed and for 3 or 4 seconds at a time. I haven't actually seen many incidents of offside due to the way in which I played but a fellow reviewer mentioned that the offside rule is flawed, which wouldn't surprise me. Mostly the ball is passed around a little, then a fast player charges past the last line of the badly organised CPU defence and either squares a pass for the centre forward or has a shot. The gameplay in general is limited, due to the problems of passing through the air mentioned earlier, coupled with the exaggerated ball physics which leads to the ball going out of play far too often. Overhead (bicycle) kicks are possible, indeed at one point I scored a goal with one and tend to be of more use than the headers, leading to players somersaulting in the air all over the pitch - a very strange sight. The heading is limited to vertical jumps to make contact with the ball, ie no diving headers and the ball is only ever headed a short distance. This makes playing passes through the air very difficult.
Any ball that is bouncing or travelling at more than a walking pace will pass through your player. The in-game controls are relatively simple to pick up but this is where the game starts to fall apart, it appears impossible to control a ball that is not moving slowly along the ground. The usual parameters are adjustable, match length, rules, etc. By default, the England team, for example, has a strange mix of fictitious players who draw their surnames from English history amongst other sources.
Only national teams are offered, along with a team editor which would enable you, should you have the motive and the patience, to adjust the players to represent their real-life counterparts in appearance and name. There are three basic options, friendly, tournament (of which there is only a fixed format, with a choice of Global or Continental) and multiplayer using all the usual DirectPlay methods, modem, serial, IPX or TCP/IP. The front-end looks quite pretty, even if parts of the tournament setup are counter-intuitive. Games Domain trashed this Real Dog quite thoroughly as follows: "The game installs easily enough, providing you are careful about DirectX.
Microsoft Soccer is definitely one of the worst soccer games ever made - and one of the many first embarrassments for Microsoft when it tried to re-enter the gaming industry in mid 1990s.
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