Desktop Soccer 2

( full review with screenshots: https://www.gaming-parrot.com/post/desktop-soccer-2-review-time-wasting ) Desktop Soccer 2 is a sequel that somehow makes just about everything about the already quite bad Desktop Soccer worse. I wouldn't have bothered buying it if not for it being $3 and only having positive Steam reviews. I probably should have known better given that one of the other reviews praises the game for having music. This is true: it has one generic track that will play in every match forever. Hooray. Anyway, if you for some reason buy the game, you supposedly get three play modes, two minigames, and team customization. Alas, one of the minigames is actually just a gacha machine and the other is a two second game you can play once every three hours to earn gacha points. Since the game takes at most about an hour to complete and the gacha is quite expensive, you won't be doing these much. The remaining three modes are tournament, which is the only real one, practice, which lets you set the CPU difficulty, and friendly, which is useless since no humans should be made to play this with you. The original game managed to be about three times as long as this one thanks to the tournament including teams who were much stronger than yours and who'd be hard to beat without stat increases and items earned from losing earlier tournaments. This game does increase the team strength a little, but it's completely canceled out by the CPU teams sticking so rigidly to zonal defense that you can basically do whatever you want if you pass constantly and go between them. It doesn't really matter if your shots are saved since the keeper will just pass to the first defender regardless of how close your players are, and it doesn't really matter if the CPU gets a shot off since for some reason they hit the posts with an astounding percentage of their shots. The only thing that will really slow you down is that SAT-BOX doesn't understand how a goal kick is awarded and you'll be cheated out of loads of corners. Even with that issue, I still won most of my games with 5 or more goals despite having a barely upgraded team. Now, technically I could keep playing from here. There are tons and tons of customization items, formations, etc, that I could unlock and if I hated myself I could repeatedly replay the tournaments to earn a single stat improvement point every time. But if I can already beat the "very hard" CPU 9-1 with my starting team, why would I bother? Unlocking any of that stuff would require grinding the same stupidly easy tournaments for hours, mostly just get me useless common items, and only result in making the game even easier.