So far this year EA SPORTS has impressed me with their releases of NHL 16 and in particular Madden 16. FIFA 16 borrows on two of the highlighted features from these games. The “on ice trainer” feature from NHL is mimicked in FIFA 16, but it is not executed nearly as well. The suggestions it makes are just the simple Pass, Shoot, Through ball etc. though it does at least give you a direction indicator for making your passes. It doesn’t provide the useful service that the trainer in NHL does, which was far more contextual and helped you with both skill moves and shot aiming. The trainer is also very slow to react to a player change, and as it shows as a big white circle at the players feet, it is far more recognisable as a selected player indicator than the actual selected player indicator (which is a small arrow above the player’s head).
Due to the lag of the trainer switching to the selected player, this makes it rather confusing and the whole system becomes more of a hindrance than the help it is supposed to provide. FIFA 16 is much slower than 15, I assume as an attempt to tighten up the defence and stop the dominance of pacey players. It works to a degree, but often leads to a very scrappy, clumsy game of football; collisions galore, often ending in baffling foul decisions, which can be costly, and there is nothing you can do about it. Here’s the thing; the pacey players still get that advantage their stats dictate, except that once they have the ball that stat appears to be irrelevant. Even the fastest players appear to be running through treacle. While that all sounds negative, 16 still provides excellent fun.
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You learn to live with these changes as you develop, and while from time to time these become moments of frustration, much like the real thing, they often bring great reward for your efforts. But what about the rest of the package? FIFA 16's career mode is still fun to play with some nice details like extra training for your team, and friendly tournaments before the start of the season. It is as competent as it was last year, but most of the fun is in its online features such as Seasons mode (where you compete against the world in multiplayer tournaments) and building up your FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) roster by collecting players on winning matches (both online and offline). If you're the sort who wants to trade the game in, FIFA manages to hold price even six months to a year after release while PES rarely has any takers. Something to keep in mind before buying.
Once again, FIFA has done a great job of depicting the world’s most popular pastime. There haven’t really been any major changes to the players themselves since last year’s FIFA 15, but they have done some fine-tuning to the animations. Both male and female players move in surprisingly authentic ways, and they look so much like the top league players they’re supposed to be representing that you’d be forgiven for confusing them with the real thing. The new active mo-cap recordings of various star players, in particular US World Champion Alex Morgan, have played a big role in bringing FIFA to this level of realism. The look on their faces when they get fouled or miss a shot are more believable than all of Brazil’s “injuries” in the 2014 World Cup combined.
Unfortunately, the commentary in FIFA 16 suffers from the repetitiveness and occasional unsuitability which past games in the series have suffered from, however, the level of dynamic commentary which would be needed to emulate real-life football commentary would be incredibly difficult to achieve. It would be nice however if EA Sports could increase the catalogue of phrases available within the game a lot further than they have done already. Overall, however, FIFA 16 is the best football experience currently available on the market. While it may have a few flaws, FIFA 16 brings us closer again to absolute realism in a football game while still delivering an experience as fun as ever.
