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N-Gage announcements are coming out of the wood-work lately, and a bevy of quality titles seem to be on the way. The first of those games is Marcel Desailly Pro Soccer, N-Gage’s first Soccer title, from the people that brought N-Gage Rayman 3 and Splinter Cell. Nokia was kind enough to give us here at Gamers Wanted a nice look at what we can come to expect from this Pro Soccer game. How are things shaping up? Well, read on and find out.

In the build we played, all the options were available: Friendly, Cup, League, Career. Friendly mode is the titles multiplayer mode. Cup, League and Career all seem to be small variations of each other: choose your team, play a multitude of games and try to bring your game to glory. In our build, it seemed like all the teams were there: 64 in all, 32 countries, and 32 international championship teams. Your team choices vary depending on which modes you choose for your game.

When you begin a game, you get to choose all types of customizable options to modify the game to your liking, such as type, teams, duration, difficulty and 1st/2nd-leg. The actual game itself plays basically the same no matter what you choose. All the gameplay elements from an authentic soccer game are there: goalie kicks, fancy ball handling and violent shin kicks are all very much intact in the game. Soccer fans will be pleased to know that the gameplay is true to the sport, and rather enjoyable. The button layout for the game is well placed too, making the experience that much more enjoyable. 5 passes, 7 shoots and tackles, 4 gives your player a running boost, 8 changes your player, 2 does a direct forward pass, and 1 gives you a deep pass. The N-Gage itself really helps make for some much deeper games than were ever before possible on the handheld format.

Graphically, Marcel Desailly isn’t all too stunning. The Soccer players are pretty generic, and the character animations are mostly pretty fluent, but there are some stutters here and there. The stadiums you play in are all a bit different looking, though you really only notice on the opening pan at the beginning of each game. The games sounds, for all there are, are decently done. There are crowd cheers and chants that all sound pretty good, and the music is your standard techno-rock menu tunes, while there is no real in-game music yet implemented.

For now, it seems like Marcel Desailly Pro Soccer is shaping up to be another good N-Gage title, and one that Soccer fans should definitely have some fun with. The graphics could use a bit of polish, and the in-game music is still missing, but altogether, I think N-Gage fans should expect a pretty enjoyable Soccer experience this April.