Charrua Soccer isn’t the first soccer (or, ahem, football) game on Apple Arcade, but it is the first to hold my attention. The original one was Sociable Soccer, which was a tad too realistic and a tad too tough to control for my tastes. I’m not much of a sports guy in the first place, so I was expecting that Charrua Soccer might also bound into foul territory for my tastes for different reasons.
But it only took around half an hour for me to realize that Charrua Soccer was scoring a goal. It’s wonderfully easy to play and pick up with either the touchscreen controls or a gamepad—even for Americans like me who haven’t given much thought to soccer since middle school. It only takes around a minute to learn the business of passing the ball to another player, holding down the button to kick harder, or even how to steal balls from other players and do a “bicycle kick” across the field.
