My first encounter with the game was definitely worthy of getting the thumbs up. Me and my mate played it through the night, 'til about 5am, but was too tired to bother writing an in depth review at that time..
In regards to Noted's point on shooting, I really like the way it's done - you can manually choose how you want to strike the ball, it has the same execution of taking a dead ball, if you are shooting left and you hold UP & RIGHT after you've shot, the ball will go down left. If you hold

whilst shooting the ball travels along the ground. Hold AWAY FROM GOAL when having a shot and you'll chip the ball. Also, if you're in control of a "Superstar" then you won't need to worry about holding the button down too long (ala WE/PES) - you can press down full whack and expect some bullets!!
Defending can be extremely shoddy, I had Desailly running towards the ball when it was rolling into an empty net, and he just turned away and sprinted off, leaving my mate an open goal...
The penalties, at first, seemed like you were left with the task of trying to get a drunken footballer to get it between the sticks, after a couple of penalties my mate and I both realised that it's a similar concept to ISS64, where you can "dummy" a shot one way and go the other. I like it.
Free kicks act as a nice departure from WE (until WE8, where you can have 2 players over the ball), although I've seen a couple of free kicks where a second player stands near the ball to act as a decoy (as far as I know you cannot take control of that player, would be happy to be proved wrong about this!).
A major advancement with the goalkeepers (over WE) is you can release the ball almost as quick as you pick it up. I do, however, sometimes find myself accidentally taking control of the keeper - he ends up running up/down the field and leaving an empty net :l .
Front end of the game is as confusing as you'd expect - my first attempt at player modifying ended with Claude Makelele being a square (you don't have to lose weight if a player's small in height - this can lead to some rather interesting looking characters!). With the players' names it's a bit hit and miss, if you can't read Japanese then you're gonna spend quite a while knowing how to track down, say, Michael Owen (I use that example because I wanted to know what faces to use for English looking players) and it took me about 20 attempts!!
You can give each player a 'Robbie Fowler' nose thingy, like your old man would wear to stop him snoring!! Nasal strips or whatever... You can't change hair colour, which is quite baffling, yet there are over 160 hair types (including the old Freddie Ljungberg 'red streak'). The same can be said for the boots, there's 60 (or is it 50!?) pairs to choose from, whilst you aren't able to edit anything within each pair. There are some weird & wonderful designs/colours, although most players will be covered in the variation!

Like WE there are 6 free kick styles/stances, which carries over to penalty kicks, ie Rivaldo leaning slightly forwards. There's not an option to give player's long-sleeved shirts/wrist bands/ankle tape/high or low socks, etc. but this doesn't have any major affect whatsoever.
The stadiums are quite nicely done, but it's the pitches that really stand out for me, and obviously (JFLORES) the net animation. If I were to be extremely picky, each stadium could have it's own style of net - but that would only be for the benefit of our Jflores & Jumbo, eh boys!!?
Kit editing seems to have been blatently copied from TIF(WTS) 2004(5), which is by no means bad. If any of you are familiar with their kit structure then you'll be glad this option is there. You can layer each part of the kit, so with the shirt you're given 7 layers (and a base layer) to which you can combine the various shirt styles. There's more sock designs than there are shorts, which I have to admit was rather odd, this therefore meant there were less combinations for the short design. But anything will be better than WE's max of 2 colour socks!
You can intentionally dive in Football Kingdom, but I've not once been pulled up for it. Every time I just chuck myself to the ground, and seem to get up & carry on before anyone's even near me. It's

+

by the way!
From a distance the player models look... well, really quite nice. Up close, though, there's a completely different story. Each player has a massively outward forehead, which is accompanied by a ridiculously low hair-line, on the neck. Whose hair (apart from a bald guy) ends in line with their ears!? If you want to see a catastrophe in the player modelling department, look no further than Christian Vieri, he looks more like Pippo Inzaghi, and way too tanned! The only player to benefit from the funky player designs is Rivaldo - hence the massive foreheads (I'm not talking Declan Donnelly forehead), I mean sticking out above the eyes!!
Overall my first impression is encouraging, I by no means expect it to last longer than WE, nor out-do it in any which way. For the moment (until the arrival of "8") I am gonna be playing it quite a lot. That's me over, wanna see if I can unlock some club teams!! 8)