There is a lot of thought put into football/soccer games: the mechanics, the feeling and overall look of the game are important to making it all tick. If many of those elements fall apart, you are left with a hollow experience and one that will mostly leave you untouched. That is what happened with Football Up Online, which has sound intentions but is nowhere near the success it could have been.

Football Up Online starts out well enough with the controls. They are very simple enough to understand and it mostly ticks the boxes. You move your player around the Circle Pad or D-Pad and use a variety of buttons for offensive and defensive moves. What I didn't understand though, is why some moves were mapped to the same buttons. It caused the game to not always react accordingly and you easily getting a card for indecent trickery. Next to this, the rules are kind of thrown of the window and the game does very little to make itself serious.

More annoying elements are found within the game's AI, which seems to do things that are, for you, impossible. They can make incredibly accurate passes to one another and shoot amazingly to the other side of the playing field. On your end, it is the classic arcade football gameplay and hoping that you can pull through towards the end. That isn't an easy feat. While playing in the one-match Exhibition mode and three-match World Cup challenge, you will always feel that you are at a disadvantage.

The game's highlight, however, are the local multiplayer options. You can send the entire game through download play to six other Nintendo 3DS units at the same time. The process is quick and snappy and they will have access to almost every option in the title. It is here that you get likely the biggest bang out of your buck and have most fun. It forms an equal playground for both sides and is overall very pleasant. Not so pleasant though are the online options of Football Up Online, which could best be described as broken. The online is a laggy mess with huge problems as it comes to input lag. It makes this portion borderline unplayable and that is a big shame.

Football Up Online isn't a great looking game either. Everything about it feels generic with low resolution textures making up the overall look of the experience. The game lacks a polish that will keep players intrigued and getting new players interested in a purchase. However, Football Up Online does bring that loveable feeling in its voice samples and music, which will certainly bring you back to the golden days of sports games. In addition to that, the 3D effect is also fantastic. It adds actual depth without distracting from the game or lowering it further in quality.

At the end of the day, Football Up Online is a half-baked product. It shows promise with its local multiplayer features and controls, but there are things that don't work about it. The online features are barely playable and the AI opponents found in the title are unbelievably unfair. Added to a lackluster presentation and you have a game with almost no staying power. That is the biggest crime Football Up Online has committed.