The Real Football 2008 mobile game from Gameloft lets you play football on your mobile phone in a versatile way. Whether you want to play a quick and simple game or playing at a championship level, it offers a good entertainment using your mobile phone. Even though I’m not much of an avid fan of football, the mobile game experience will give you enough excitement to go back to your mobile phone for more.

At first, I was not at all sure that I was going to enjoy playing Real Football 2008 because of several reasons. For one, with football requiring a lot of playing field I was thinking how can it provide a satisfactory playing experience on such a small device as the mobile phone. The other is that I never was an avid fan of football.

The first thing that got me curious was that the game is in 3D. So I went on and played the mobile game. You can play the game in different modes — friendly, Road to 2008 and Challenge Mode. I went on to play the friendly mode. Starting up a friendly game, you will have to choose the teams. When choosing teams an indication of the team’s power, defense / attack skills, stamina and speed are indicated. This will give you an idea of how the teams are matched up against each other. You can set the different game parameters like game length, difficulty, extra time, playing stadium, weather, net color (hmmm, if you think of it the color of the net can be a factor in a real game) and coaching.

Then choose your game field formation and tactics (attack, defense or balanced). The game experience does not stop here. After choosing all those parameters, you can even choose the players for the team that you think will give you the advantage. Excited to get a look at the level of 3D graphics that the game has to offer, I just choose the default.

I was actually surprised that the graphics was actually good considering that I was just playing it on a mobile phone. The movements were quite smooth and didn’t notice jerky movements. The game screen also provides extra help by displaying the whole field on the lower right corner together with the players displayed as dots on the field. This sort of help me to get a whole picture of what was happening on the playing field. You’ll also find the time and game score on the upper left corner of the screen.

As an added touch, the game can give you a replay of what happened if you managed to get a goal. You can even pause the replay to check out the play by play.

The game really offers a several other modes like cup (Int’l, European, Club), league (national, club) and penalty kicks. To be able to really immerse yourself into the mobile game, you can start off on training. Training is even offered in three levels - Basic, Advanced and Free Training. Even if you don’t know how to play the mobile game, you’ll be an expert by the time you’re done with the training :-).

For the avid football fan, this game has a lot of features on how to play the game that it will keep you company for hours and hours on end of game play. If fact if you get to play this game, maybe you can share your experience with us.

If you want to try out the Real Football 2008 mobile game yourself you can get a copy from the UK site of Gameloft. Here’s some screen shots of the Real Football 2008 Java mobile game: