EA’s annual FIFA games tend to come in two flavors: the important milestones that introduce a wealth of new gameplay mechanics, and the routine ones that simply tweak a few things here and there and mainly exist to keep the yearly tradition going. FIFA 16 falls squarely in the latter category. On the pitch, not much has changed. The game’s pacing has been slowed ever so slightly, but only to the extent that you’d have to have both games running side-by-side to notice. Meanwhile, a new off-the-ball dribbling mechanic adds some lovely new animations but will only be mastered by a small number of expert FIFA players.
These key gameplay features don’t instantly take hold, and the first dozen or so games will feel slower than last year. But stick with it, and these refinements present an iteration of FIFA which allow the engine to excel, creating new types of goals, and intriguing challenges for those who like to go deeper into tactical play. They allow the flow of the game to increase and decrease like real world football, and together, they make FIFA more playable for the long term, encouraging master, rather than showing the goods to the player at the first kick and allowing them to run with it. It’s a laudable design decision, and one I commend.
For instance, the passing remains a huge annoyance - especially when stacked up against PES which perfects the art. You know that age-old adage about football, ‘the ball is faster than the man’? Of course you do. Everybody in the world apart from EA Canada knows it. In FIFA though, quick passing moves are off-limits due to the ball apparently weighing a metric tonne. Plus, the touch of players on FIFA is awful, with the ball control (or lack thereof) of top players often baffling.
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Yet, in the UT mode, this huge variety of players is your downfall as your team's performance depends to a great degree on the team’s chemistry, how well each player works with the players around him. Since players will get along better if they are from the same country or from the same real-life team, the game’s variety becomes a boomerang that makes building a strong team harder and more expensive. It also makes players attributes less important than their country of origin, a weird move both in terms of gameplay but also in terms of real-life football where the best teams in the world consist of players from all kinds of countries.
The level of unpredictability brought about by the aforementioned variety in passing responses is an example of a much-needed injection of dynamism into proceedings and is in stark contrast to the days where matches of FIFA - be it on Ultimate Team or Online Seasons - would devolve into a series of preconceived tropes and repetitive actions of abuse. It's taken far too long but gone are the days where pace-afflicted speedsters would induce tremors within the legs of defenders with a mere sleight of foot or turn in any general direction.
While I’m unlikely to spend hours playing matches with the England women’s team, that’s not exactly a shocking admission. I (and I suspect most other players) only ever play as a fraction of the hundreds of licensed teams. In my case, mostly those perennial tenants of League One Oldham Athletic. Unfortunately, all the over-zealous referees who went missing from PES 2016 were apparently shipped off to FIFA 16, because I’ve seen some fairly innocuous nudges given (and received) as penalties. This can make the more frequent penalty box jostling a bit of a gamble.
