UNIS Pulls The Curtain Back On Fantasy Soccer

Exactly a month ago, we ran a story about a brand new soccer video game that was shown off at a trade show in China. Apart from a photo of the game at the UNIS booth, we had no other information to go off of, so we’ve had to wait. Today, UNIS uploaded a trailer of the new game, Fantasy Soccer, to YouTube for us to get a better idea of how it plays. Here’s the trailer(make sure that CC is activated so you can get the translation of the Chinese text), then we’ll analyze:

As mentioned in the first post about this, it has been quite a while since the market has seen a straight-forward soccer game in arcades (the one exception has been Sega’s WCCF, but that involves cards; it’s not exactly Virtua Striker). Given how popular soccer is around the world, it’s been a little surprising that we haven’t seen more titles like this.

Fantasy Soccer as seen at the GTI Asia China Expo 2018

For Fantasy Soccer itself, it is hard to say if this is the final release version of the software or not. Judging solely by what you see above, the animations & frame rate need some work.  The controls are simple, meaning that anyone should be able to grasp them – use the joystick to move, one button is for running, the other for switching team members and you kick or slide by kicking the soccer foot controller at the bottom of the machine (like in Namco’s World Kicks). As we also noted in the first post about this, it appears that locations can link two cabinets together, leading to 8 player matches.

UNIS will be at IAAPA 2018 a month from now, so I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for this one in the likely event that it is there. What do you think about it from the trailer?