With a new - or rather, merged - title, Winning Eleven returns for another year to bring portable soccer to new heights, with Winning Eleven: Pro Evolution Soccer 2007, featuring teams from Europe, Africa, The Americas and Asia & Oceanic, as well as custom teams and even the famous (or infamous) English football clubs like Manchester United and Arsenal. Though it may have a full roster, DS sports games are a hard thing to sell due to the limited graphical power when compared to the PSP - and this version is no different.

Using strictly the face buttons to control, Winning Eleven offers a lot of freedom and moves for players. While on offense, X, B and A work as various passing shots like the through pass, short pass, long pass (which can be held to change the length and height), and even lob passes can be performed by holding the L trigger first. The shot button is mapped to Y and also has various heights and lengths, depending on how long you hold it. Upon entering the defending team's goal area, you can double tap the A button to cross the ball to another player in front of the goal, making for some exciting aerial goals.

While on the defense, there are a couple different tactics to utilize, although they aren't all needed. Most of the time a simple tackle will suffice, or just putting pressure on the player is enough to get the ball out from under their feet. You can also apply two-player pressure, with the sacrifice of losing some cover elsewhere. There are various other context sensitive moves, mostly for when the ball is in the air and you're moving in to intercept. The controls for Winning Eleven are solid, although players who are to soccer games might have a hard time learning all the different tactics when going up against the AI, which is quite smart and tricky from the start.

With the basic gameplay elements well established and a lot of fun (you'll find yourself tensing up when you run up for a shot and hit the perfect angle, which is a great sign for any game), the penalty shootout could use some work. It's essentially a guessing game, where you decide which side you want to kick the ball to and the goalkeeper decides which side he wants to block. Then the kick is performed and the keeper hopes he picked the right side. It isn't particularly enjoyable in any form.

What Winning Eleven does right though is reproduce the strategic aspect of soccer. Players can select from numerous formations, as well as swap out their team to put better-suited players in specific areas. Plenty of statistics are available for every player, as well as overall team stats, and you can also select the members of your team that you want to participate in the penalty shootouts, based on their stats and positions.

It may be a bad thing or an incredibly fortunate thing, depending on how you look at it, but Winning Eleven doesn't make any in-game use of the touch screen, other than telling your team to play on defense or offense. While this is fine and probably a good idea for the sake of the game, it leaves very little reason to pick up the DS version over the PSP, which has much, much better graphics. The game features some very fluid and well-realized animation, even for the little guys on the screen, but the graphics do indeed look like a PSOne soccer title, which is expected by now for 3D sports games on the DS. With a map that's impossible to look at and identify teammates on the fly due to its small size, and very block characters, what reason is there to pick up this game over the much better looking PSP counterpart?

The answer to that question is Wi-Fi play! If you have the access, Winning Eleven offers the chance to take your created team, made up of various real world players if you so choose, and battle it out online against other people. It's a great option to have and a rather surprising one, to be honest. Local multiplayer is also available, either through download play or multi-cart. Granted, it's much better and more convenient to go online with the console version of Pro Evo, but it's loads of fun to be able to head out to a local Internet café or McDonalds and have a game online.

The sound could have used a bit of extra work though, mainly being made up of the same 'thud' sound effect for the ball, whistles and repeated audience reactions. To its credit, when you approach the goal, the audience does get a little louder in anticipation, which is a great touch. The menu music is decent - catchy even - but overall the sound has little impact, although at least it doesn't become annoying either.

Winning Eleven: Pro Evolution Soccer 2007 is a great DS soccer game and probably the best one out there; Konami have produced some excellent animations to counteract the poor graphics (which nothing can really be done about), and Wi-Fi play is a wonderful addition. However, when compared to the rest of the versions that are available, there is little reason to grab the DS version, unless you don't own a PSP and really want to play soccer on the move. If you're just looking for a good match of footie on the DS with some depth though, Winning Eleven is a...

GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLL!!

...Sorry.

Reviewed by Christopher Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).