UEFA Champions League

Year 1995, Sound Blaster churning out commentary and real Champions League footage flashing across the screen. For a moment, you thought this was going to be something big. Then the menu appeared.

UEFA Champions League by Philips Interactive Media is a football game built on the official 1995/96 season license. Back then, a license meant real clubs, real logos, footage from actual matches in the opening video. On paper, a solid foundation. But paper can hold a lot of things.

Once you get past that opening cinematic wrapper, you'll find that the actual game falls short in a way that wasn't uncommon in the mid-nineties, but here it feels especially cheap. The gameplay is flat, the controls unresponsive, and the whole football experience hovers somewhere between average and dull. Krisalis knew how to handle football decently back then — but this doesn't look like they had enough space, time, or ambition to do something original. The result is a generic product that a license sticker can't save.

I remember how back then with every PC football game, we'd first check if it had live commentary and how the goalkeeper reacts. This one barely scraped through both tests. The biggest appeal remained the opening video — and that's a sentence that says more about the game than any score table ever could. At a time when FIFA from EA Sports had already shown a year earlier where the genre was heading on PC, this looked like bargain bin merchandise.

Today you'll play UEFA Champions League from 1995 more out of curiosity than conviction. Retro fans who collect period football games or have a soft spot for anything with a Champions League logo from that era will get something out of it. Everyone else will probably close the browser window after ten minutes and fire up Sensible Soccer instead. And that would be the right call.