Review – FIFA 13

Football Sim

HA!  It counts for shit, Terry. You got banned. You got fucking banned.

Rich

Cometh the Autumn, cometh the next minor revision to the FIFA engine. The fact that you can play this version all day, eject it and slap in FIFA 09 without the need to particularly adapt your play style at all pretty much says it all and any site that tries to tell you that FIFA 13’s passing is ‘so much better’ or any such bollocks is run by absolute fucking bellends.

That said, as a standalone title, FIFA 13 is in some ways completely astonishing.  It still looks superb with an attention to detail bordering on the psychotic and, like all FIFA games released after FIFA 08, it plays a damn good game of football too.  The range of animations is literally incredible and allows a flexibility in the gameplay that mimics real football as accurately as can be expected from anything with less processing power than Megatron.  The problem is, that’s true of the last few FIFA outings and can no longer legitimately be thought of as anything that impressive anymore.

As ever this is some promo bullshit screen wank that has very little to do with the real graphics.

In gameplay terms there is little here that you haven’t seen before.  The introduction of some very enjoyable training mini-games is very welcome but in terms of playing football all they’ve done is tweak the config file in the game to make shooting a little tougher and dribbling a little easier. Set pieces are a tad easier to pull off and allow you to jump over the ball like some sort of pointless wanker but overall this really is 99% the same game as last year.

If you’ve not owned a FIFA game since fucking Chico Time was number one then this really is the game to get (and you can add all the review points you want to our final score if that’s the case). It’s more or less perfect (apart from the now mandatory terrible menu system and the money-grabbing Ultimate Team Mode) and has enough game modes to keep you happy until Raheem Sterling retires. But if you own last year’s outing, there really is no reason to get this and given that it probably won’t drop in price until this time next year you might as well stick with FIFA 12. Or 09. We don’t care.

Rating: 7/10