Football’s a sport rife with cliché. Listen to any number of tedious post-match interviews and you’ll no doubt run out of fingers and toes counting the instances of phrases such as “At the end of the day”, “It’s a game of two halves”, “It’s eleven men against eleven”, and “The referee’s a ****”. As such it seems apt that the football videogame market is dominated by an old adage itself: two’s company, three’s a crowd.

The two cash cows of FIFA and Winning Eleven (or Pro Evolution/ ISS) have the market pretty much sewn up, making obscene amounts of money for EA and Konami respectively. It's very difficult for another company to make waves in the genre.

Lacking the graphical gloss of Winning Eleven, and the official competition licenses of FIFA, World Tour Soccer (or This Is Football) has the ace up its sleeve of holding the FIFPro license, meaning that it has the real names of almost every player competing in most major leagues in the world. 18,000 of them in fact, from 23 leagues and 31 divisions - perhaps the most all-encompassing spread of players since Sensible World of Soccer nearly nine years ago. But of course, all this is superficial unless the game is actually fun to play.

Which is something of a pity, as London Studio seem to have abandoned what was by far the best thing about WTS2003: the wonderfully simplistic, fast and snappy arcade playability. What was arguably one of the most instantly enjoyable and rewarding football games since ISS64 has become something of a headache: the onscreen players now seem to have to think about what the player with the controller is ordering them to do. This results in a strange “lag” between the buttons being pressed and your team member actually executing his task. Thinking two moves ahead in chess may be a good idea, but in real-time football games it is less desirable. Any gamers without the gift of clairvoyance will find it hugely irritating to have to plan each kick in advance. Set pieces such as free kicks and corners have a strange, spongy feel to them, using an arrow to guide the ball to its destination, but this can be avoided using the icon-passing feature, which enables the player to highlight an area on the pitch, or a specific player to hoof the ball to. The addition of unnecessary complication hampers the fast and responsive nature of their franchise, bringing to mind yet another old saying: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The transfer system has been polished somewhat: gamers can now shortlist potential purchases and can actively transfer-list members of their own squad to avoid the annoying build up of clag - a problem in the previous game. Offers are made to and from other clubs for players using real money (as opposed to a points system, favoured by FIFA and WE) which give tournament victories real meaning when it comes to bolstering your team for the next season. This time around, reasons are given if an offer is rejected and the game actually shows the counter-bids from rival sides after the same player, which makes the auction-like nature of acquiring new talent a challenge in itself. It is this aspect of the game which really outshines its contemporaries and, whilst still not quite as good as the market dealings in Sensi (still no option to part-exchange or swap players), it is arguably the best squad building system currently available.

Graphically the game has few signs of improvement over the 2003 incarnation. All major players are accurately modelled on their real-life counterparts (with the exception of Beckham, whose ever changing hair must be a source of consternation for developers) and are very well motion captured: how many other football games can you think of where you see players scratching their particulars before kick off? The managers and crowd now have a few polygons to be proud of, the stadiums are still probably the best of any current footy game and the digital representation of Rio Ferdinand is one of the most terrifying sights ever.

As before, the commentary is provided by ITV’s Peter Drury who does an adequate job of narrating the proceedings, only this time he is “assisted” by jabber-monster John Barnes. Thankfully, Mr B doesn’t say much but Drury seems to consider every goal, be it a penalty or a scruffy goal-line tap in, to be the most astonishing sight in football history, consequently making any praise seem incredibly shallow. The crowd samples are still a mixed bag – play with any major side and they sing appropriate chants, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for Liverpool and the wonderful “One Man Went To Mow” for Chelsea for example. Oddly though, lesser teams’ fans all seem content to bellow “Roll Out The Barrel” at the tops of their lungs. The rest of the soundscape is rather sparse though. The fans never seem to react at all to shots that narrowly miss the target or if your team is applying immense pressure on the opponents to give you encouragement.

London Studio have seemingly given the ball straight back to the opposition with this instalment. Whereas FIFA and WE make slow but sure progress with each successive year, the second-party Sony outfit have half-heartedly fiddled with a few aspects of the game instead of improving the general quality of it. If they were a manager, they’d be Claudio Ranieri – a potential rival to a market previously dominated by two seemingly unstoppable forces, but one who makes bizarre and baffling changes to a decent team that have probably been his undoing.