There is no FIFA 24 this year but EA’s first football game without the name is still a very familiar experience.
So here it is: the first post-FIFA FIFA game. Yes, it’s going to take a while to get used to that rather bland and insubstantial new moniker; it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue and it’s awkward to write out. But after a weekend spent with, err… EA Sports FC 24, we’re left with more than a suspicion that fans of EA’s – and the world’s – flagship annual football game franchise won’t find it difficult to cope with the enforced name change.
To recap, EA declined to renew its official FIFA licence for what had been the FIFA series of games – due, it’s rumoured, to FIFA’s beyond-eye-watering financial demands. And so EA Sports FC was created instead. EA has retained the official licences for all the major football leagues, as well as the official UEFA licence, so you sill get all the teams from the Premier League, the Football League, all Europe’s domestic cup competitions, and all European cup competitions. The only thing that won’t appear in the franchise, as a result of the split with FIFA, is the World Cup.
When EA announced the split with FIFA, FIFA itself asserted that it would make its own FIFA-branded games, which will, according to them, be ‘the best one.’ Meanwhile, EA has clearly used the forced rebrand to up its game and completely rethink the franchise, introducing a raft of technical innovations to what was already, by some distance, the most technically advanced football game in the world.
What’s immediately obvious is that that while, from the moment you boot it up, FC 24 is tangibly different to its predecessors, it still manages to feel reassuringly familiar. The first thing you notice is that EA has reworked its main menu. Many would argue that, given the game’s increasing complexity in recent years, with a welter of new modes that go far beyond the franchise’s original remit, it’s high time that happened.
Wisely, EA has opted for function rather than flashiness when performing that exercise and while the new main menu does telegraph how EA would prefer you to play its game – with the card-based Ultimate Team, the franchise’s notoriously microtransactions-centric dream team generator mode, at the top – it turns what could have been an overcomplicated mess into something simple and logical.
If you haven’t played a FIFA game for a while, you will marvel at the number of different modes on offer. As well as Ultimate Team (manna for those who were raised on lootboxes and Fantasy Football), there are two different career modes: Player and Manager. The latter goes all out to ape Football Manager, except it also lets you play all the games rather than just watch them (although you can, of course, automate them if you want).
As a player, you can work your way up from non-league football or start off at your favourite Premiership club, plus you can opt to control just yourself or your entire team in games against the AI. The ability to define your player’s off-pitch personality, and the need to negotiate the sorts of real-life minefields that young, rich footballers encounter, adds a surprising amount of depth to Player Career mode.
Manager mode should also prove popular: the way it lets you drill down into the minutiae of hiring backroom staff, setting training drills, dealing with transfers, and sending scouts out to find the latest talent in foreign climes rings pretty true. Although that sort of territory very much belongs to Football Manager, which inevitably does it in more depth.
Pursuing a player career is undoubtedly rendered more interesting by the newly conceived presence of PlayStyles, which let you customise your player’s attributes in role-playing fashion. Creating, for example, a striker with a super-powerful shot, impeccable dead ball skills, and Messi-like dribbling ability.
Different PlayStyles unlock different skill moves, and the concept – which impinges on most aspects of the game, but is front and centre in the Player Career mode – makes a lot of sense. For years, FIFA games have pinched ideas from conventional role-players, and PlayStyles feels like a culmination of that.
Old-school FIFA fans will want to head to Tournaments, which lets you pick a tournament – the Premier League, say, or the Bundesliga or FA Cup – select your favoured team and work through that tournament against AI-powered opposition. Which is essentially the Career mode from late-90s and 2000s FIFA games.
Seasons is the grassroots online competition, which lets you work your way up the online ladder until you qualify for full-blown esports status, and can be played solo or co-operatively. Clubs is similar, except you control just one player, which could be your player from your Player Career or a completely different one you’ve created from scratch.
Meanwhile, Volta Football – EA’s middling attempt to add a street football element to the franchise – returns, for those who emphatically don’t see themselves as footballing purists.
One neat aspect is that any modes that you aren’t particularly interested in will move further down the main menu, the more you play. So the game, to an extent, customises itself to suit your tastes.
Graphics, ball physics, animations, and more have been upgraded for FC 24 and it even introduces volumetric motion capture derived from real-life TV footage. However, there’s always a danger that technological overambition could led to bugginess and implausible on-field happenings. But EA has been making football games for longer than anyone else and for decades have been remarkably bug free, at least given the number of moving parts.
If you had to use one phrase to describe what playing FC 24 is like, that phrase would be buttery smooth. EA has added new features supposed to make its vast store of players move and play just like they do in real life, and while you may not explicitly notice that (especially with the default but impeccable zoomed-out camera angle), you will notice that everything that happens on-field looks and feels more true-to-life than any game (including the FIFA games) ever has.
It just feels right: passes go where you want them to go, Power Touches let you take the ball away from opposition players exactly how you want to, and dribbling is a joy. And FC 24’s presentation is phenomenally good. It does blow its own trumpet at times, giving you a big Hypermotion V graphic when a replay shows that you’ve triggered a volumetric mocap sequence, for example. But the players are more recognisable than ever and cute touches abound, such as stats which overlay themselves on the pitch when, for example, the opposing goalie is working his way up to taking a goal kick.
We did notice a couple of very minor incongruities – for example, playing as Tottenham Hotspur, FC 24 made manager Ange Postecoglou, who could politely be described as an avuncular-looking teddy-bear of a man, look like some sort of ageing Hollywood leading man. Mind you, anything that flatters big Ange is fine by us.
We’ve also heard mutterings about the presence of female players in Ultimate Team, and specifically the way in which they’ve had their stats buffed to make them as physical and skilful as the men. A great sentiment, and it’s undoubtedly thrilling to field a mixed FUT team (with the F now standing for FC rather than FIFA), but those who like to imagine that FUT is somehow true to life will take some time to adjust to that particular new reality.
We wouldn’t presume to make too many definitive statements about FC 24 just yet, having only spent a couple of days with it. Certain aspects will undoubtedly emerge, that require patches, adjustments and rebalancing. However, even a few days has been enough to discover that as far as its most important aspects are concerned – on-field play between familiar teams – FC 24 is a corker.
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EA may well have indulged in a certain amount of sandbagging – keeping back some upgrades that could have gone into previous iterations, in the knowledge that a franchise rebrand was imminent. That would explain why FC 24 feels like a quantum leap forward, not just for the franchise, but for football games in general.
In previous years, fans always faced a dilemma: did that year’s FIFA game contain enough new stuff to justify its purchase, presuming they already owned last year’s game? No such dilemma exists for FC 24: it already sets new standards for smoothness and slickness and it can only get better from here.
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: £69.99*Publisher: EADeveloper: EA Vancouver and EA RomaniaRelease Date: 29th September 2023*Age Rating: 3
*early access via Ultimate Edition from 22nd September (also 10 hours of early access for EA Play members)
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