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Come on you reds! Phew, what about Liverpool, eh? If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times...

I give up. After writing over half a dozen intros to soccer games in the fast couple of months, I'm running on empty. So stuff the lot of you. I'm not even going to bother to construct entertaining paragraphs for you to read, all you're getting are the bare facts. Off we go then...

Liverpool: The Computer Game is based around the famous team of the same name (don't go looking for a team called Liverpool: The Computer Game in the leagues because they're isn't one). It's a 3D arcade game a bit like Striker. All your favourite Anfield heroes are in it. And... the rest is in the captions. So go and read them.

On the face of it, Liverpool has everything a footy fan could want. Fast-moving action, after-touch, league and cup competitions, the real players... Unfortunately, however, the game's specifications on paper are a lot better than the reality. Liverpool suffers from lots of problems that conspire to make the whole thing look and feel amateurish. Given the game's 3D viewpoint, comparisons with the similar-looking Striker are inevitable.

The action is (thankfully) slower than Rage's effort, ranging from ideal on the dry pitches to just-too-slow-and-quite-annoying on the wet ones. There's little to choose between them in control terms, although I'd say Striker has the edge when it comes to co-ordinated play.

Liverpool has a passing system that is just too tricky for it to work - 50% of the time, you accidentally kick or chip the ball when you mean to pass it and it's annoying. The temptation is simply to boot the ball and run after it but more often than not this results in chaos. It's like playing pinball on a football pitch and it's not a great deal of fun. The player sprites and animation are poor, by the way - they may be large, but they run like the good Bill and Ted robots out of Bogus Journey.

Oh, and the players look the same too, so Barnes is now a white man and Molby has jet black hair. The referee is far too harsh as well, dishing out cards like he's got a pack of 'em. Basically Liverpool is a classic example of the programmers concentrating on the wrong things - in this case, writing down little player biographies and having animated indicator arrows on the players, rather than coming up with an Instinctive control system and inteliigent computer players. Without those two things any football game is stuffed, and Liverpool is a particularly sorrowful example of this because it nearly gets it right, but falls down because of several sloppy mistakes. Grandslam's game could have been as great as the team it's based on, but instead it comes across as Just above average. Maybe Tranmere Rovers would have been a better licence.