Even if I still have a bit of fun with it every year without paying, it’s the barbarous nature in which you can quickly be pulled into debt by going full Gollum with one last precious player pack. Regardless, Ultimate Team’s bread and butter of buying and selling silly little guys is still impossible to recommend. The current selection features highlights from the golden years of Jurgen Klopp and Kylian Mbappe, but in next year’s game, it’d be awesome to see what EA’s team can do with other footballing legends like Pelé and ‘King’ Kazuyoshi Miura. It’s early doors, but there’s tantalising scope to chronicle player careers and recreate immortal moments of football history with this mode. Moments offers bite-size pockets of FIFA gameplay in the form of rewarding challenges designed to test your shape and figure out how different cards work together. Quelle surprise, Ultimate Team has received the most attention, and the team training mode I’ve long been looking for has arrived in the form of FUT Moments. I still think it’s criminal that it’s only available on weekends, though. The good news is that it seems EA listened to my cries for an enhanced Volta Arcade, so I take full credit for the fact that it has now been expanded into a moreish battle royale mode of silly minigames and obstacle courses that evoke the best parts of Fall Guys. Because the power relies upon crossing and teamwork, most just pick Power Strike and haphazardly smack the ball after a glory-seeking run. Unfortunately, FIFA’s street football vehicle, Volta, suffers a similar fate, epitomised by the new ‘Take Flight’ Signature Ability that turns you into an aerial maestro. For me, this amounted to receiving 25 ‘Maverick Points’ for purchasing a ‘High-end Hybrid Mattress’ for a Serbian striker in the K-League, so you can imagine how long I stuck with that. Player Career has a new personality system that lets you, in most dramatic air quotes, roleplay as your chosen footballer. Microtransactions still loom large, but small iterative changes and the horsepower of new-gen consoles combine to make FIFA 22 feel like a worthwhile upgrade without needing anything revolutionary or terribly exciting from EA’s side. Goalkeeping blunders and visual inconsistencies aside, this year’s FIFA is still one of the most nuanced and enjoyable multiplayer sports games on the market, and new additions across Career Mode and Volta Football have made FIFA’s major modes more fun to play. There’s something about slotting away a Bruno Guimarães assist while listening to pounding German Drill that makes grinding out a lousy Career Mode season much more palatable.įIFA 22 heralds the next generation of virtual football, and while it doesn’t reinvent the ball, the attacking and defending gameplay gains moment-to-moment fluidity. This lets you pump in the typically dazzling soundtrack, which offers Bad Bunny bangers and underground earworms from DOSS and Cryalot. The exhausting match commentary is back with a vengeance, but after hearing “he dispatched it with aplomb” one too many times, I was giddily reminded that this year you can turn it all off and attempt to undo the years of psychic damage from all the negging about your play style. Defenders will poke their leg around the back of a player they’re jockeying, and keepers react convincingly when they don’t have vision, diving to the floor as a defender blocks or stumbling backwards to swat a deflected ball. It’s primarily seen in player animations on the pitch rather than actual faces, which still vary wildly in quality between cover stars, regular players, and the cultish crowd. FIFA 23 also includes a visual upgrade – though it’s far more iterative and gradual than last year’s leap to PS5 and Series X – focusing this time on scuff-happy grass and bouncy hairdos.
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