Upon starting the game, it certainly seems like normal soccer fare: control and switch between your eleven soccer players and play against the eleven opposing team members using an assortment of soccer tricks and maneuvers. Considering the history Midway has with sports interpretations, you’d think that jumping and kicking your foot onto an opponent’s nose would be business as usual, but instead there’ll be a blow of the whistle and a yellow card received. In fact, besides the addition of a turbo bar at the bottom of the screen, this supposed soccer game of leonine intensity is little more than a cat’s meow.

Of course this is only upon starting up the game and the “Referee Strictness” bar in the options menu hasn’t been toyed around with yet, but this is where the game starts to become keenly interesting. Lower the bar all the way down to the barest minimum and the referees had might as well be automatically revolving cardboard cutouts or the hot-dog vendors in the stadium stands. Polarize the bar and suddenly the referees are out with a personal vendetta, sometimes even issuing red cards on first offense (the fact that there are no substitutions puts on a fun and harrowing twist), which is on top of the ferociously tough opponents that rarely loll around and exploit you almost every slip. Naturally, not normally being much of a soccer player, absolute and total referee lenience piques the most interest in me, creating a game that is reasonably fun to play from beginning to end.

Among the decently sized amount of modes to choose from are World Conquest, Finals Mode, and Tournament Mode. World Conquest eats up a large portion of the game since it’s composed of you and your team traveling around the world and knocking down the competition for the World Cup. For the more impatient and instant-gratification craving player, Finals Mode is a good choice as it skips over the normal games and puts you at the very beginning of the finals, so one loss results a quick boot out. Tournament Mode is an orchestrated multiplayer mode which lets you and some friends choose up to 16 teams and compete in the ladder. The presence of a team customization option is always a sweet and deft touch for any sports game and Red Card’s team editing, however simple, is as effective as can be.

The aforesaid turbo bar is also another good touch, used in conjunction with other basic maneuvers to create some neat spectacles (after watching some of the moves and full-motion video, one gets the feeling that someone at Midway was a fan of Shaolin Soccer). The turbo inserts an element of surprise and strategy when the player utilizes it effectively and keeps an eye on the opponent’s bar.

However, the thing that I find most disagreeable is the controls. While you can use the referee switch to turn the game from meticulous simulation to the button-mashing arcade type, the controls always retains its fairly complex demeanor (in the manual, seven pages alone are set for detailing the controls), forcing the game to take up more residence in the “meticulous simulation” camp. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to meld your brain with the interface, but that does much to hurt the important pick-up-and-play factor that the other Midway sports game have.

Red Card 20-03 is certainly not an imaginative little game (it being a sports game and all), but it sets its sights on a reasonable goal and accomplishes it for the most part with polished aplomb. I don’t see myself recommending this game to anyone not particular to the genre or this kind of game, but veterans will probably find enough to enjoy, warranting a purchase.

· · · Sqoon