Dudley United Football Club have a fresh future ahead of them. Starting off a 'small and minor club', the creation of the team involved a few simple factors. First, picking which nation to play in. Then selecting a geographical area. That's how we got stuck with Dudley, in case you were wondering (lovely place - we especially like the blue pop they sell round here).

Next we had to pick from a handful of playing styles. Do we look to build our team around a big player of two? Or perhaps go for a slow build-up game? Not us. Counter attacking is the heart and soul of Dudley, and that left just two crucial decisions before we got down to business. What colour strip to wear (all white, so you can see the blood stains better) and, er, who our secretary was going to be.

Sadly, our plans caught the eye of a big moneybags and, within ten minutes of the game starting, William Alwyn (whoever he is) decided he wanted to buy Dudley, and so the pressure was on to win the play-offs we'd found ourselves in without lifting a finger.

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And then the game started going wrong.

We had thought we were in the midst of a football ownership sim, where we built up the club, did various deals, employed the manager, that sort of thing. But Let's Make A Soccer Team instead insists on running you through seemingly pointless micro-management, with slow and clunky menus that suck any gesture of fun out of the game.

The match day engine isn't bad, to be fair, but it's one of the rare moments where the game focuses on its core business; it mainly prefers to concern itself with polishing up generally pointless details, such as the obsessive aforementioned secretary.

Even within an hour of playing the game, the sheer novelty of what originally seemed a different approach to representing football on the PS2 had dispersed, replaced by a concentrated burst of utter tedium.

Bluntly, if William Alwyn still wants Dudley he's welcome to it, but once this review's done with we're not inclined to load the game again to follow up his potential takeover.

Sometimes, as with games like We Love Katamari and Bishi Bashi Special, heathens in the West fail to fully embrace Eastern gaming originality and brilliance, meaning the Japanese take many of their most interesting games and keep them to themselves.

In the case of Let's Make A Soccer Team, it's one rare instance where we wish they had kept it all to themselves.

A desperately boring football game that throws away both its initial premise and promise and substitutes it with nothing of any real interest at all.