Reviews
Last year EA Sports Canada scored an absolute winner with FIFA 09, pleasing soccer fans around the globe with what was easily the best FIFA game to date in the long standing franchise and a new benchmark to which any further iteration would be compared. Another years worth of development time under their belt and FIFA 10 is ready to play super sub and get some time on the pitch. The big question is can EA trump its previous best? Long answer short… yes. Though this isn’t as massive a leap forward as last year there are enough improvements under the hood to bestow it with the current best players award, thanks mainly to one great evolutionary step in game-play.
On the surface nothing major appears to have changed in FIFA 10. Visually the graphics look equal to that of its predecessor, the audio commentary from Clive Tilsley and Andy Gray is near identical bar a few new lines and revisions for this season. Indeed if you watched both FIFA 09 and FIFA 10 side by side there isn’t that much that sticks out as glaringly obvious unless you were a hardcore fanatic. It’s only when you pick up the controller and begin to play that you realize there has been one major introduction to the on-pitch proceedings. That change is 360 analog controls and it is an absolute game changing design, a change for the better I might add.
At first this change seems trivial. The un-coupling of players from the standard 8-way directional movement we’ve seen since year zero doesn’t appear to be anything major. Slowly though the nuances of how this alters your playing style become more apparent. You can now arc runs “around” defenders, make more specific angles to give yourself space on and off the ball and from this there is an instant feeling of not being limited to designated pathways around the pitch. It’s a subtle yet important upgrade that simply compliments the way the game should be played.
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