Mini Review – FIFA 11

Football

Oh God, make them stop.

Mike

We know what to expect from FIFA these days.  It looks crisp, sounds authentic and has a capable engine to run off whilst EA add some new additions which are sometimes functional or straight-up novelties.

Typical bullshit EA "screenshot"

So let’s deal with the welcome additions.  ’11 now sports a much more precise passing model which means you’re judging the weight of each pass more and having to consider just where you’re sending the ball.  As a result, the pace of the game is considerably slower than World Cup 2010.  From a player perspective, Personality+ is this year’s buzzword and it surprisingly delivers.  Players now feel slightly more like they should with players like Andy Carroll playing well with their back to goal and Lionel Messi sporting his trademark shortened strides.  It seems like there’s some considerable thought put into this and it makes players finally feel like something more than robotic waxworks.

Be a Pro and Manager Mode combine to make Career mode, in which you can flip between being a player, player/manager or manager, if you so wish.  It’s a nice convenience but I’ve never seen Be a Pro as anything more than a novelty.  Being a goalkeeper is a nice addition, though.  It’s implemented in a sensible way that makes net-tending a challenge.  There’s plenty of on-screen prompts to indicate where you should be placed and where the ball is coming from.

It’s a shame that the single player still marred by the same bullshit they’ve had since they brought this engine out in FIFA ’08.  The game’s passing engine is unmatched and the players do make a lot of movement off the ball.  Maybe not the movement you’d like, but it’s a start.  What riles me is how tethered the AI will make you feel.  You could put this down to how they’ve modeled the physical side of the game but when you’re blatantly held back by invisible rope, you can scream bullshit.  It’s even more apparent in the way the game doesn’t want you to score ugly.  The CPU will net rebounds with relish whilst your players will react like a wasp’s just came into the room.  It’s been like this for years but it’s the kind of jarring thing that reminds you that you’re playing a game.

Online strips that away but replaces it with the typical crowd that picks a five star team right off the bat.  This community also seeps its way into the new Creation Centre. Another novelty, it allows you to create a team online and drop them into Exhibition games in FIFA 11.  It’s a decent creation tool but there’s an awful lot of overrated tosh in the player database.  Typically, if you want the best out of FIFA online, find some friends and stick with them.

All in all, FIFA’s hit the watershed.  It’s making baby steps when, had it any considerable opposition, it’d be pulling up trees to iron out the corner-cutting made to AI.  It’s good but nothing groundbreaking.

7/10