EA Sports FC 25 Review - I Can’t Believe I’m Doing This Again

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Harry Alston

Published Sep 23, 2024

Followed

Every year a dwindling group of my pals get together to play FIFA, or as it's now known, EA Sports FC. Usually on the eve of the early access release date there’s a sort of festive feeling. We don’t get together on the Xbox much anymore these days, but once a year we always set aside a couple of hours to get stuck into the new FIFA, only now we remember it’s not FIFA. The first few weeks of each new iteration are always the🐬 most enjoyable anyway.

I’m not a Career Mܫode 🍃or Seasons player, so this review will be primarily focused on Ultimate Team, the most popular mode in the game.

This year, however, the mood is different. One close friend of mine - someone I played over 300 matches against during the lockdown - simply says, “FIFA isn’t fun.” My other friend pipes in to say, “FIFA isn’t meant to be fun. It’s a noble undertaking.” And it’s true. As I’ve grown older, the more♔ I’ve realised that Ultimate Team turns me into a sad, soggy, miserable, angry sack of a man. And yet I play every year, with a level of hyperfixation that I wish I could turn to something else, but seemingly I only ever save for the first week of a new FIFA. Sorry. EA Sports FC.

3:55

Why The Elder Scrolls 6 Has Much More To Prove T🦹han GTA 6

Battle of the sixes.

Posts 1

The most glaring issue with EA Sports FC 25 is that this is barely a new game. The menus are strikingly similar to the previous game. I’d actually go as far to say the menus are worse than FC 24, mostly because they’re unbearably laggy and glitchy. The graphics are the same. In fact, I had to load up EA Sports FC 24 to compare, and I can’t tell the difference. EA has sold the exact same game almost down to its most minute details. I’m not surprised. It does this ꦬevery year. The last significant change we had was between previous generation and next generat𝓡ion consoles, and even that wasn’t that noticeable.

Some m🦩enus even include cards from EA FC 24, and some teams .

That being said, there are some good changes in FC 25. For one, the new Rush game mode is a brilliant addition. Itꦗ’s a casual 5v5 mode which brings the sort of levity that Ultimate Team has needed for years. I do recommend playing with some friends, because watching xXFIFASKILLS06Xx do random skill moves only to lose the ball over and over again is frustrating in the way only FIFA can be. I’d also recommend turning off the commentary -𝔍 if you figure out how to do it - because you can only hear, “that was as cold as the bathroom floor” so many times before you want to turn the Xbox off and throw your controller onto those very same icy tiles. I can only hope that Rush won’t be forgotten about by EA, left to rust away somewhere, like Volta before it.

David Alaba running on the pitch in EA Sports FC 25.

I’m also really enjoying the new tactics system added to Ultimate Team. This introduces way more complexity to the way you deploy your team on th🌳e field. In my current set-up, I’ve got a system that allows Trent to drop into the midfield, a role that he excels at - more on that in a moment - as well as Frimpong as an inside forward. This creates an overload in the middle, and makes me feel like Pep Guardiola when I see it all in action. A🦹s always, there are probably meta tactics and player positions, but where’s the fun in that? It’s much better to play with something you’ve created.

Playe🗹r Roles are also new. With the addition of Playstyles last year, Player Roles continue to add to the individuality of each player. Rodri has the ++ Role of Holding Midfielder and Deep-lying Playmaker. You can adjust these roles in the tactics, allowing you to get the most out of your players in their best positions. It’s the ongoing effort of EA to make the players feel more li𓆏ke their real-life counterparts, and also add some Football Manager-esque player management that I’ve always thought has been missing from Ultimate Team.

We’ve also now got duplicate card storage for 🐓SBCs. Thank y♒ou, EA. Thank you.

However, none of these features are particularly groundbreaking or game-defining. As always with a new FC game I think that there has to be a better and fairer way for this to work for the consumer. My ideal is always a seasonal model, one that follows the real-world football season. Update the existing game, set everyone back to zero - with legacy cards for those who still want to play with their old teams and look back on cards they’ve collected - and provide live-service content updates as EA does for☂ so many of their other titles. That way you get the same buzz of a new game without having to pay £100 for basically the same game engine, graphics, and features every year.

An image of Lamine Yamal in EA Sports FC 24.

Of course, this won’t happen, because EA has complete dominance of the football g𒁃ame market. I๊t charges £100 for its Ultimate Edition because people pay that. They pay it every year, and will continue to do so until the heat death of the solar system.

It’s always difficult to score EA FCgames in a traditional sense, because the game has remained ultimately unchanged from previous iterations. Will I play this game a lot? Yes. Will I enjoy every minute of it? Most definitely not. But there will be moments that I enjoy, like packing a really good player, or clutching a win i༺n FUT Cham🌞pions. It’s an FC game, through and through. You’ll either love it or hate it, or, like me, you’ll fall probably somewhere in the middle.