FOOTBALL REFEREE SIMULATOR REVIEW: WHEN BEING THE BAD GUY FEELS SO GOOD
Ever wondered what it's like to be the most hated person on a football field? Well, now you can live out your dreams of ruining matches and making grown men cry for less than the price of a post-match beer.
GRAB YOUR WHISTLE AND QUESTIONABLE MORALS
Football Referee Simulator lets you step into the shoes of the one person everyone loves to hate. It's like being a traffic warden, but with more running and significantly better crowd attendance. For a game that costs less than your average sandwich, it offers a surprisingly engaging experience of making split-second decisions while thousands of virtual fans question your parentage.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE OFFSIDE
The core gameplay is refreshingly straightforward – you watch matches from a bird's eye view, making calls on fouls, offsides, and whether that player really needed his third yellow card of the match. The story mode adds a dash of personality, letting you build your referee's career from amateur leagues all the way up to matches where the bribes get more interesting than your actual salary.
SMALL BUDGET, BIG WHISTLE ENERGY
Look, this isn't FIFA with its billion-dollar budget – the graphics are simpler than a referee's understanding of the advantage rule. But somehow, that works in its favor. The 2D presentation is clean, functional, and gets the job done, even if the falling snow sometimes makes finding your cursor harder than spotting a honest player in a penalty box.
MONEY TALKS, REFEREE WALKS
The game's economy system lets you invest your hard-earned (or questionably acquired) cash in stocks, gold, or lottery tickets. Though clicking to buy investments one by one feels more tedious than watching injury time when you're one goal up. A simple slider or input box would've saved both our fingers and our sanity.
THE RULE BOOK NEEDS A REWRITE
Not everything is Premier League quality here. The offside system sometimes feels more confused than a VAR review, and time-wasting calls can be more bizarre than a goalkeeper's fashion choices. Some rules aren't quite accurately implemented – like being able to call offsides on throw-ins, which isn't a thing unless you're playing in some parallel football universe.
CONCLUSION
Football Referee Simulator is like that Sunday league referee who shows up in jeans but somehow gets the job done. It's rough around the edges and could use some polishing, but at its core, it's an entertaining take on an overlooked aspect of football. For less than the price of a match program, you get to experience the beautiful game from the other side of the whistle.
Is it perfect? No. But for the price of a cheap meat pie, you get a surprisingly addictive game that lets you live out your inner Mike Dean fantasies. Just don't expect Premier League production values – this is more Conference North than Champions League.
Score: 6.2/10 - Like a controversial penalty decision: not perfect, but gets the job done.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way. Though we might need therapy after receiving death threats from virtual football fans.