FIFA has been another one of EA’s perennial sports franchises that continues to sell well in Europe and in the United States. However, just like NCAA Football, this series still has some problems and has created new ones. Is it good enough to be the sports game of the year, or are the legacy issues and new problems going to drag it down? A little bit of both actually.
“FIFA 13″ makes a couple of changes that fans will and won’t like. For starters, they revamped the first touch or when a player first gets the ball. It is revamped in a way that it is more realistic, with the ball going far ahead if a player sprints yet the player will have more control if they slow down and try to plan out their movements.
It is a visible difference that means a lot to the strategy of the game and makes the game much more realistic, especially the nice graphics and the revamped physics system, which makes tackles much more realistic and life-like.
However, even though they put that in, the only major add-ons are the Skill Games and a change in the career mode. The new Skill Games are meant to help players by having them do drills, such as players dribbling the ball between poles, doing crosses and taking shots via a free kick.
In career mode, players can now try to play not just to get on their club but also their international team, one of the biggest honors any soccer player can ever have. While it is fun to do that, it is the only real addition to the career mode and it’s sad that that is the only addition, even though the rest of it is still good.
While the game is good, there are still problems, either legacy issues or new problems that have arisen. First and foremost is that there are still button continuation problems. Since slide and cross-kick are on the same button if I go for a slide yet my player just steals it, he’ll boot the ball away because the game read it as a cross instead of a steal.
The same happens when I try to poke the ball away; poke and shoot are on the same button, so there would be times when he would shoot it instead of poking it away. Second is that instead of the arena being the first thing players do, it just goes right into the main menu and the players have to access the arena from the main menu, hidden away in a subsection of it.
The new Skill Games are not that impressive and are hard to do, the shooting is still off, making it hard to score and it is now very hard to score with a header from the cross.
Your player has to be in the right location at the right angle in front of a defensive player and has to jump at the right time; it was never this complicated in “FIFA 12,” where you could still score even if the defender was in front of you.
Overall, the game isn’t that much of an improvement on the series overall. Even though it is the best-selling FIFA game ever (with 4.5 million sold so far), it still has old problems while new ones surface.
If you’re a FIFA fan, you’ll like the few add-ons while cursing at some of the old problems. If you are new to FIFA, you might want to consider going back to “FIFA 12″ and just waiting until “FIFA 14,” when they will hopefully make substantial changes. I give “FIFA 13″ a 4/5
