Zlatan Plays Diamond Soccer

Zlatan plays Diamond Soccer features retro, ala “bird perspective” game design, honoring the “Kick-Off” franchise that was popular on Amiga and other home-computer systems back in 1989. Your team of 5 players will try to win all the fixtures around the world across 30 levels and unlock as many guest-stars as possible. Once you beat a level featuring some of the other “star” players, you can make them play for you by replacing your current players through the team-management option where you also spend coins to renew their contracts. Coins are rewarded to you during the gameplay on couple of different occasions like scoring goals or winning a match.

The game is fun to play and easy to control. There is one virtual stick on the left screen side that moves the players and one pretty large “swipe” area on the right responsible for everything else. Matches last 3 minutes each, there is plenty of action involved and no fouls, off-sides, outs (or referees for that matter). Levels can be 3-starred (diamond-ed) by winning the game by certain amount of points (usually 6) and the more diamonds you get, more coins will flow.

Zlatan plays Diamond Soccer can be downloaded from the Play Store for free. The only drawback is the annoying “energy” system that holds you back from fully appreciating this game. If you don’t like waiting for it to recharge, you can buy some of the energy packs that will also “upgrade” the meter by giving you more bars, but offer no recharge time reduction. Since coins are needed for contract renewals and new player, you will have to 3-star most of the matches in order to get the maximum revenue possible. This might be a problem as the game is a bit on the hard side, and restarting a match will automatically deduct some of your “energy bars”. Unfortunately, this staggers your career as you can’t progress further unless you wait or buy some of the IAPs. Additional coins can also be purchased from within the game, in case you wondered.