Soccer (or, as the majority of the world calls it, football) fills a rather large void in my life, and so any video game that tries to emulate The Beautiful Game will definitely be on my radar. While FIFA 17 may be the big event of the week, it’s an update to a slightly smaller football simulator that has made me most excited over the past few days. The game, of course, is New Star Soccer (Free) – being one of the mainstays on my iPhone for years, the perpetual updates since its release on iOS back in 2012 have gone a long way to altering the experience, for better and for worse. While a transition to freemium threatened to spoil what was one of the most compulsive mobile games of recent memory, New Star Games managed to balance and improve the experience well enough that it still remains an enjoyable arcade soccer simulator in the App Store. Today, the developers have released their biggest update yet for New Star Soccer, and have provided a complete graphical facelift to bring the game firmly into 2016.

When you load up the recent version of New Star Soccer, the redesign is immediately apparent, both in the menus and on the pitch. While New Star Soccer has always been extremely intuitive to navigate, the updated UI greatly helps to streamline the process further, as well as adding an extra element of professionalism and polish that surpasses the Noughties online Flash game feel of the classic option. It is on the field that is most impressive, however, as all the player models are made to be fully 3D, and the pitch and weather effects are far more dynamic – rain conditions actually sound like heavy downpour, and striking the ball provides an extremely satisfying ‘whack’ sound that may seem superfluous, but in practice makes a world of difference.

The ability to watch replays is also great to relive some of the more epic golazos you may attempt, and the addition of the football magazine FourFourTwo sponsoring the news articles in game actually creates a whole new level of realism that other console soccer simulators have also emulated in the past few years. New Star Games have also added an option to revert to the previous classic graphics, if you had a particular penchant for those, or would like to save battery, which is a nice touch. Further tweaks and fixes aside, New Star Soccer is ultimately the same game now as it always has been, but far prettier – which, in my book, is a fantastic excuse to revisit one of the best football games on mobile.