Smash Football – The Ultimate Arcade Soccer was recently released on the App store for iPhone and iPod Touch for the very reasonable price of £0.69/$0.99. We had a chance to review Outsider Development’s latest offering, and it turns out, it’s actually pretty good.

The premise of Smash Football is that the animals are having a football tournament, and whoever wins gets to play against the humans in the end. There are several 5-a-side matches spread across 6 tournaments and environments, as well as some challenges that are unlocked as you play through the game. You start off by choosing a team of animals, of which there are 25 to choose from, and each team has it’s strengths and weaknesses.

All of the instructions are communicated to you through text, but the game will give you a short tutorial in the beginning so you can get used to the user interface. Once you’re in a game, a d-pad and 3 buttons will appear on the screen. The buttons allow you to change to the player closest to the ball or shoot the ball (if you have it), sprint and use power-ups or punch the opposing players. If the ball gets to your goal, the screen will change to the goal-saving screen, where you have to touch the ball to stop it from getting into the net.

Each team definitely has its own strengths, so you need to work around these at times with the power-ups on the board. The power-ups allows you to drop traps or attack players on the field, so you can steal the ball. If you lose the ball, you can switch to the player that is nearest to it and use that character to get it, but your team will automatically try to obtain it. The ball can also never fly off the pitch, so each match is 4 minutes of pure gameplay.

It’s a surprisingly fun game, but does have some problems. For example, it can be a little easy at times, especially the goal-saving. Also, when you figure out exactly how the AI works, you should easily be able to win every match, but as you progress things do get a little harder. It’s also a little difficult to tell if you actually have the ball, a few times I was running, thinking I had the ball, but turns out the other team had it, and I just didn’t notice.

Smash Football has a significant amount of gameplay for the price, there’s at least a couple of hours to play through, and crucially it’s also fun to play. The only issue I have with it is that I don’t see much replay value in it, but it’s definitely worth the low-entry price. It’s also aimed at children, which is evident from the overly nice smack-talk, but big kids will find it fun too. You can find out more about the game and buy it on the iTunes App store now.

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Here’s a free code for the game for a lucky reader, redeem it on iTunes: K9TAMPTMAJJR.