Ahhh football. Never has a game incited such passion in men and women all over the world. Regardless of age, race, gender or location football has the type of following that some religions would gladly trade for in the morning. And it was inevitable that the desktop and console football games would eventually make their way over to the MMO world and Football Superstars is one of the…well…. stars of this genre and can lay claim to being the worlds first virtual football MMORPG game.

Because of the graphical and overall game complexity this is a download only game and you’re going to need the following specs to get the most from the game:

Windows XP

Intel Pentium 4 2.2 GHz or AMD 2500+

1GB of RAM

NVIDIA 5200 or ATI Radeon 9600 or better

128MB of video RAM

Windows Vista/Windows 7

Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz or AMD 3400+

2GB of RAM

VNVIDIA 5750 or ATI Radeon X300 or better

128MB of video RAM

If you have those minimum requirements then you can get on with playing the game itself. Obviously the game revolves around the sport of football but more specifically about you developing your skills and becoming “somebody” in the big, big world of football (or soccer for our American friends).

The game itself takes a while to download and install but is free of most of the headaches that can be part of this process with other games. You’ll need to create a free account before you install the game but this only takes a few minutes and again is pretty painless.

Do yourself a huge favour and go through the tutorial before you play the game otherwise you’re probably going to find yourself a bit lost in the player interface and the game isn’t going to gel with you at all. Although this is typical of most gamers – try the game first and then maybe, just maybe, read the manual.

Visually the game is impressive and definitely has the wow factor and has more than adequate audio to match them and you’re going to be busy keeping up with the on-pitch action to really notice much about the audio in the game.

Within the game itself you can either play as a solo player or you can also create and manage teams if that floats your boat a bit more. In multi-player games you can have up to 11-players on each team which is the norm and any more than that would just be chaos but you do have to pay for the team based multi-player games; apart from that the game is completely free to play.

The skills and attributes you can build up to and achieve are really, really well though out and I can see any football fan, even a newbie, getting hour after hour of enjoyment from Football Superstars.