In response to the awesome review by Indie-cent Exposure:

Hello! Thorsten here, the creator of Natural Soccer. I want to thank you for this fair and detailed review. I really appreciate that you took the time to highlight both what you enjoyed and where the game could still improve. Honest feedback like yours is invaluable for a solo indie dev!

Thanks for your feedback on the controls, glad you like the offensive play overall. As you only mentioned tapping the buttons, please note that holding the shot button will create more powerful/higher shots and holding the pass button can be used for longer and straight through passes. Guess you are right about a tutorial missing...

I'm very happy you like the quick "pick-up and play" I am aiming for with my game!

As for the touch controls: yeah, they aren't my preffered way of playing either - but what can you do about it on mobile? Maybe you want to try the game on Windows with full controller support? Anyway, I hoped to have implemented proper touch controls with the floating stick and resizable buttons. Please let me know how you would like to see them improved. You mentioned the pause button being a problem. I deliberately moved it a bit out, so you won't tap it accidentally while playing. Moving it to the top right would collide with the time display. Any ideas are welcome!

As for the player switching: you are right, that definitly would need some introduction/tutorial - as it's far more clever than it seems: the game tries really hard to predict which player you'd like to control next. For this, always _pretend_ to control the player you want to switch to already, by pointing the stick towards the ball - seen from that player's position. This will make the "wrong" player run away, and the game will detect your intention and switch players in about a second. This also works with off-screen players: so the general rule is, if you want to switch to a defender closer to your own goal, push and hold the stick _away_ from your goal. Having a separate button for player switching is something I might implement in the desktop version, were buttons don't take away valuable screen space.

Sliding tackles are designed to be realistic and risky. I find myself to use them sparingly only to intercept long passes or as a last resort. You seem to disagree?

You are right, that there is no explicit difficulty setting (although I might add one in the future). It's implicity tied to your team selection: choose a top-tier team like Brazil, England or Germany for "easy" and lower ranked teams for increased difficulty.

"Natural Soccer: World Championship is one of those games where I kept thinking it was only a couple of small design choices away from feeling much better." - what are the biggest pain points in a nutshell?

Please try the "pretend" approach to player switching and let me know what you think!

True, set pieces are not the strongest aspect in the game... but I tried hard to make them intuitive and easy to use with the indicator line. And did you know that you could always "override" the indicator and use the pass button to play a (surprise) pass instead?

The players being "frozen" until the ball is kicked is a result of countless balancing sessions: when players are free to move all the time, scoring just becomes far _too_ easy... but I take your criticism as motivation to revisit that part of the game.

And you are right about depth: the World Championship edition is just the beginning of the Natural Soccer series revival. It is meant to be a fun, quick game for the tournament. There is "Natural Soccer 2 / Arcade FC" (not yet sure about the better name) in development, with a full career mode, substitutions, transfers, editor and more. But this is a "completely different beast" and will take many more months of development time. But instead of keeping on working in private, I wanted to start developing it in the open, so that I could get feedback from the community and make the game better for everyone - that's how the World Championship edition came to be.

Also, using real player names is an absolute no-go "thanks" to licensing restrictions, unfortunately.

But you are right about the draw handling of single matches: maybe it would be better have extra time and penalty shootouts in single matches?

Last not least: thanks for the appreciation of the "pay once / no in-app purchases" approach I chose very carefully - fair play!

Thanks again so much for playing and featuring the game!

Thorsten