You can tell that some games are going to be bad after playing them for about thirty seconds.  Ultimate Beach Soccer is one of those games.  If it were a rental, I would have just cut my losses right away and chalked up the rental fee as a total loss.  However, I am a game reviewer and so was compelled to continue playing while trying to keep an open mind about the game.  Being a game reviewer does have its darker moments.

I started out with the game's skill drills so that I could get a feel for the controls before trying a match - right off the bat I knew that I was probably in trouble.  The dribble drill involved pointing the controller in the direction of the next set of cones as the player shuffled painfully slowly across the beach.  Apparently I was playing on quicksand and not beach sand.  To make things worse, the game failed to register that I passed through a set of cones not once, but twice.  When it came time to actually kick the ball in the penalty shot and target practice drills, I was lucky if the ball went where I aimed it half of the time.  After steadfastly plugging through the drills (and setting a "world record" score in the process), I took a deep breath and moved on to an actual match.

In Ultimate Beach Soccer you control a team of four players and a keeper on a short pitch staked out on beach sand.  The game includes 32 international teams, although most are locked in the game's tournament mode at the start.  Not that that really matters all that much - even though each team has a skill rating there's no noticeable difference between any of the teams.  Once you hit the beach with your team most of the normal rules of soccer apply.

The theory with beach soccer is that the soft sand forces players to keep the ball elevated if they want to have any control over it.  This in turn makes for an interesting subject for a video game, filled with nimble juggling and acrobatic bicycle kicks.  Unfortunately Ultimate Beach Soccer is such a mess that it turns what should be a fast-paced and acrobatic free-for-all into slow, repetitive drudgery.  Let's start with the control.  In a few words it's just plain awful.  First of all the players all move like drugged hippos moving through peanut butter.  Next, if trying to adjust to playing soccer at the speed of mud wasn't bad enough, you can't even count on the buttons to work consistently.  Sometimes it takes repeated button mashing just to get the game to register a shot or pass.  But it doesn't end there.  Occasionally players will decide to pass the ball in a random direction for no apparent reason.  It's bad enough when a player suddenly kicks the ball to an empty sideline and out of bounds, but nothing can match the frustration of watching your player pass the ball backwards and into your goal when you were trying to pass the ball up field. 

It's not just the control that doesn't work right - the game has some serious problems with the basic rules of the game. I saw corner kicks awarded to the offensive team that kicked the ball out of bounds and on another occasion the game called a corner kick only to put the ball in the hands of the opposing goalie without bothering to line up anybody for the kick.  No big loss though, since the game does not give you any control over a corner kick anyway.

All of this buggy, sluggish play is wrapped in fuzzy graphics and accompanied by lame, repetitive sound.  There are very few player animations and you'll see them over and over again.  Even the halftime show features the same four tattooed bikini dancers doing the same jerky dance every single time you play.  You'll wish someone would just put them out of their misery.  If all this wasn't enough, to make things really repetitive the game features a play-by-play announcer that has about seven or eight short phrases.  By the hundredth time you time you hear him mispronounce athleticism as ath-let-ism you'll be ready to wring his virtual neck.

Ultimate Beach Soccer is one of those games that just can't be recommended to anyone for any reason.  It is a half-hearted, incomplete, untested effort and not even worth a rental fee.  Don't waste your time.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 15%.  Ultimate Beach Soccer is ultimately awful.  If this is Ultimate Beach Soccer, then I don't even want to see Mediocre Beach Soccer or Awful Beach Soccer.