Review: You Are The Ref

It happens to the best of us: you're sat watching a football match when a referee makes what you feel is an idiotic decision. You shout at your TV, you vent your spleen on social networks, and you inevitably announce that you could do a better job yourself.

Well, 4 Door Lemon has decided to call your bluff.

In principle, playing as a referee could make for an incredibly boring game. Imagine a version of FIFA in which all you could do was pause a match and dole out cards, penalties, and free kicks. Konami would rejoice.

Thankfully, You Are The Ref takes a different approach, providing you with pub quiz-style questions with multiple-choice answers.

It's nothing overly exciting or revolutionary, but it works well given the context. It also helps that there's artwork from the cult comic strip accompanying each question – especially in Name the Player mode.

Shooting from the sidelines

Surprisingly, for a game based on such a simple concept, it still manages to get things wrong.

While it's sure to be appealing if you're a huge football fan, if you're anything but deeply invested in the sport You Are The Ref is a tiresome trudge of one confusing question after another.

Every question seems to have three entirely plausible answers and the situation descriptions are so long-winded that you'll consider giving up reading them halfway through.

Perhaps You Are The Ref isn't supposed to be played solo, as sitting down with a friend certainly makes things more interesting. But this a handheld title on Vita, so you're unlikely to break it out down the pub or the park as you would a smartphone game.

To say You Are The Ref is bland is to do it a disservice. It does exactly what it intends to. But, for the cost, there are far more entertaining titles on PlayStation Mobile that anyone can enjoy - not just the passionate football fans and armchair referees.