When I first came across Golazo, I got legitimately pumped. It’s been so long since we’ve had a good arcadey soccer game, and I desperately want something like this to recommend to my soccer friends. To be clear, I’m one of those people who has a GameCube and four controllers all ready to bust out the original Super Mario Strikers at any moment.

And I wanted to like this game, I really did. But unfortunately Golazo doesn’t quite deliver on my admittedly high expectations.

With arcade football (soccer) titles, one generally expects easy-to-pick-up gameplay, with fast action on a colorful pitch. Controls should be relatively intuitive, but with a few nuances that become evident over time, so that the experience achieves the state of “easy to pick up, difficult to master”. In trying to enjoy Galozo, however, it feels like the execution here is a bit rough. While one can see what they were going for, the resulting game-feel isn’t quite my cup of tea.

For example, the game doesn’t seem to have any auto-targeting or aiming assistance for passing. When you pass the ball, you need to point the thumbstick in the exact direction you’d like it to go. (Most of the time, you also need to hold down the pass button for a time in order to kick the ball with enough power to reach your teammate.) The precision required to make this work is considerable, and kinda unforgiving—especially if you want your player to run to the outside while threading a through-ball between defenders on the inside—so new players will need a lot of practice to get used to it.

Then there’s the fact that switching players on defense almost never gives you control of a defender between the opponent with the ball and your goal. Basically every time I change players on defense, the game gives me control of the player who was most-recently driven past by the other team’s forward. It’s really frustrating.

Now granted, if you and a friend are both starting fresh with Golazo, and you’re getting used to the game by playing against each other, then these aspects of the gameplay probably won’t be so bad. If you’re both new to the game, then no one put at a disadvantage by the learning curve. Play against the computer, however, and everything feels cheap. It’s as if the CPU is just deciding when to give itself a game-winning goal (or two), while you struggle to make even basic passes work.

On the positive side, Golazo’s low-poly, cell-shaded aesthetic looks excellent. It reminds of a bit of Jet Set Radio and fits the vibe of this game extremely well. The variety of player hairstyles and accessories they’ve worked into this art style is also rather impressive.

Unfortunately things aren’t as cool in the audio department. The music is generally fine and unobtrusive, but the game’s announcer is probably the worst I’ve ever heard. The delivery of every line in Golazo is so deadpan and completely emotionless, I assume it has to be a parody of something. But it’s not just match commentary that’s delivered this way; the game announcer narrates every single move you make in the game’s menus too. Seriously, he literally calls out “pause!” anytime you pause the game. You also cannot turn off the announcer without disabling all the game’s sound effects, which is just madness.

So yeah, I didn’t much care for Golazo myself. That’s not to say the game is terrible by any means, just a little rough around the edges. If you’re really craving arcade soccer action, and you happen to find this one on sale, it might be your while. But for me, I just gonna boot up the old GameCube and play Mario Strikers for the thousandth time instead.