The mobile game Score! Hero took my middle school by storm when it launched in 2015. The game offered a very unique type of fun for our community of adolescent soccer fans – namely, the fantasy and narrative of crafting a professional soccer player’s journey, as well as the challenge of solving a ‘puzzle-like’ sequence of soccer moves through the games’ mechanics.
Score! Hero’s core game mechanics involve the user drawing lines with their finger to direct passes in a simulation of a soccer game. The way this mechanic is utilized creates the challenge Because the simulation pauses between passes, the user is able to take their time and think through the optimal pass to successfully build to a goal. This makes the game feel much more problem-solving oriented than other sport simulators like FIFA , which move much faster without pauses in between game actions. Furthermore, successfully scoring a goal ‘clears the level,’ with different levels of success (measured in stars) depending on how you went about solving the sequence of passes. All of these components create a multi-layered obstacle course for the player to solve, contributing to the creation of challenge fun.
This entire gameplay loop is framed through the progression of a fictional soccer player, from humble beginnings to international stardom. Users get to customize their character, along with things like nationality and playing position. This fantasy role-playing element lends a sense of progression to the discrete game levels, and allows users to enjoy make-believe fun. Additionally, the narrative of the career progression is portrayed through animations of football set-pieces, and fictional newspaper-clippings describing the player character’s exploits. This improves immersion, and the games’ plot twists and turns lend a sense of drama to the overall fictional soccer setting.
