Academy of Champions Soccer (Wii)

ACADEMY OF CHAMPIONS SOCCER tells the story of a young soccer fanatic who gets a Golden Ticket offer to start school at Pele's school for gifted athletes. The school looks more like Hogwarts than any sports camp you might envision and that's in keeping with the almost-magical soccer skills children can learn there. Through the course of a full school career, the player will make friends, build a team, undergo a lot of practice drills, and compete in loads of matches to earn a spot in the Championship Tournament against the villainous soccer brutes from rival academy, Scythemore. Games are played on fantasy-inspired fields that may be loaded with Greek ruins or Amazon jungle trappings.

The career mode of Academy of Champions Soccer is as much a plot-driven role-playing game as it is a sports simulation. Following your characters progress from his or her first day of school all the way to the final championship game of the last term is actually rather riveting. Along the way you build friendships and rivalries. You'll come to know and like some of the supporting characters just as much (if not more) than your hero. The experience point system allows you to keep building your character's skills even if you're not doing well in the beginning -- which makes your chances of actually finishing the game all the better.

The ability to unlock and recruit secret characters from other UbiSoft games will mostly appeal to older kids, given that several of  those characters are heroes from M-rated games like Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell to name a few. But the regular student characters should have enough personality to please most. The soccer games themselves are kept short (usually 8 minutes) to keep the pace moving nicely, and magical special moves add a nice touch of fantasy action.