The offline game gives players the opportunity to play in a knockout tournament, league season, cup championship, or just practice with your team. Within league play, gamers even have the option to play all the games or just manage in a league manager mode, leaving the roster and upgrade decision making to you and the playing to the computer. The game saves your progress in each mode automatically, making it easy to build your team into a powerhouse over the course of multiple seasons. If the league mode has a blemish, it is the strikingly similar play from one team to the next. Games feel too familiar from one opponent to the next, but they go by almost too fast to care.
In addition to all the solid offline game modes, the game allows two teams to face off over Live. You can choose to play with either pre-made teams, or a league team that you create and maintain for Live play only, with a higher premium placed on player upgrades, but the same basic upgrade system intact.
Graphically, the game offers both the original 2D top-down view and three new "HD-advanced" angles in 3D. The "HD" graphics the game purports to have are a bit of a joke, and look marginally better than the original. The angled camera adds some height to the players and gives a better sense as to the depth of the field. It is a nice touch, but neither graphics sets are impressive. The original should is intact, and as dated as one would expect from a sixteen-year-old game.
Speedball 2 is not going to win any beauty contests, and the controls make it feel as though you are playing with a field of squeaky tin men, but it is not without its charms. The wealth of game modes, ability to run and grow an online team, and frantic gameplay ensure you will play this title for longer than a quick stroll down memory lane.
