If you are avid fan of football (to the rest of the world, soccer in the U.S.A), you’d probably seen on TV  pitch invasions whereby fans get onto the field to wreck havoc. Check out the video below to get an idea on what happens when a pitch invasion occurs; this video features SEVERAL during a West Ham – Millwall match.

The guys over at Gamegou decided to come up with a game called Soccer Stealers HD based on this premise with players playing the role of a single hooligan getting on the field and stealing the ball from the footballers. The objective here would be to keep running the ball into any of the goals but it’s game over once the hooligan gets tackled. While the hooligan is controlled by tapping on the screen to indicate where to go, players can use power-ups, like watermelon slices and beer to get the footballers off their backs.

While I laud the unique premise (I’ve never heard of a football hooligan/pitch invasion game before) and the use of a pretty good 3D engine (admittedly the game is rather cute looking), the gameplay felt repetitive and boring after 5 minutes. There’s only so much you can do running a ball into either one of the goals and avoiding footballers at the same time;  your hooligan can’t even shoot. The developers could have also added some polish to the menus and the intros, that would have made some improvement in stirring interest in the game at the first place.

Soccer Stealers HD features Game Center connectivity for online leaderboards, but that does little to redeem the game. Soccer Stealers is a universal app that works on both iPad and iPhone and is available on the App Store for USD 1.99. You can check it out here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/soccer-stealers-hd-league/id391432860?mt=8 but it seems to be suffering from the “developer giving high ratings to their own game” syndrome at the moment. Mediocre.