FIFA has been a game series that really hit it’s heights last gen. Built from the ground up from FIFA 08, FIFA each year kept improving leaps and bounds from its predecessor. FIFA 13 really hit its heights and reached it’s known peak, with FIFA 12 and 13 being absolutely fantastic football games at the time, you wondered if they could keep pulling it off yearly. Unfortunately that dried up and they changed FIFA 14 into being more physical and sluggish, in their view more realistic. 15 achieved everything in presentation for the next gen consoles (or current gen now). With the official premier league licensed HUD, and all 20 premier league stadiums which was a dream come true, it was shaping up to be a perfect game…
Until you actually had to play FIFA 16… the gameplay was that boring and sluggish and merely a refined FIFA 14, a refinement on a flawed FIFA in my opinion. FIFA 16 was a boring game in my opinion and it hit that point where FIFA really needed a big change, a huge innovation in the modes and gameplay. If you’ve played one FIFA game, you’ve played them all, so there were very few tweaks that I needed to make to set up the game. After playing the first game, I immediately set up a second game with the women’s team (more on that in a moment) and saw a few of the options to choose from, including kits, stadiums and time of day. I was hoping to have the option to adjust the weather condition as this year’s game is supposed to include dynamic weather but that option wasn’t available. However, the referee’s vanishing spray is available. Also, the offside line has returned.
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The more complex settings of the Trainer system may also help fairly experienced players grasp some of the more technical controls of the game, including low aerial passes and driven ground passes, the latter of which is a new and immensely useful addition to FIFA 16. Despite it being possible to play the game without any of these advanced controls, making them easily accessible in an in-game context is helpful, and the Trainer system does well to remind players of this. The game itself plays a little more physically than FIFA 15. A lot of rebalancing has clearly gone into adjusting players’ statistics, especially where Sprint Speed and Strength are involved.
What this does is make the game less breakable, as such - you may have trouble keeping up with Cristiano Ronaldo or Gareth Bale, but they won’t be unbeatably fast, and this aids the defending, which has also gained a few new, helpful mechanics, including fake tackle and slide tackle recovery. Now that you’ve got a few tips on how to begin your Ultimate Team there is no excuse not to dive headfirst into this brilliant game mode and compete with players from all around the world. FIFA 16 is already available on the market on PlayStation, Xbox and PC, so go and grab yourself a copy and start building your Ultimate Team.
You likely won’t notice much Chemistry between your players during your second game because there won’t be much of it to go around. That’s because, rather cruelly, your team of perfectly-aligned star players will be substituted for a randomly-issued bunch of relative misfits from League 2 and the Hyundai A-League. It’s a bit of a step down after controlling the likes of Messi, Bale and Ronaldo, but that’s what you’re here for - to build an ultimate team, not to have one handed to you on a plate.
None of which is to say that FIFA 16 is a bad game; just that it hasn't come up in the same leaps and bounds as PES has, and that makes me worry for its long-term future. FIFA fans will point to the series' ace-in-the-hole, its comprehensive set of licensed teams, and I'd gladly concede the point. I've lost countless nights attempting to haul my Notts County squad out of the lower league mires and improvements to the player development side of things, with young players noticeably rising in value as you persevere with them and build up their attributes on the training ground. As a single-player pursuit, FIFA has PES licked in terms of structure, volume of things to do and immersion, but the monotony of the matches might wear you down over the long-haul of a season
