FIFA 15 is again a great football game. However, EA partly seems to have used to improve the wrong parts. The game is like a top club that reinforces the attack for huge sums while defending rattles. The first matches in a new part of FIFA are always awkward. Indeed, there is a little to the habits that a year are rusted to disrupt. A versatile player who is 180 degrees around with a trick, a defender slipping a ball that wobbles slightly different if you're aiming at the intersection. It is the minimal adjustments knows every FIFA and you after a half day also takes back to "normal."
FIFA 15 is a lot better than expected, but still not the FIFA we dreamed of. Despite few new features, plenty were improved, especially goalkeepers. FIFA 15 will be the best soccer game you have played in years. Every year, we await the FIFA franchise’s annual release. We await to enjoy the months on end of playing 12 year-olds on Ultimate Team who spent their mom’s credit card on a stacked team. We await the months on end of playing someone in South America with their dodgy internet connection. We await the career mode games that show your five time Champions League winning team fall to Wigan every time you play them. Why, after years of few improvements and even stripping of features, do we find ourselves drawn to FIFA? Aside from NBA.
EA Sports has launched its FIFA 15 TV advertisement campaign with a new commercial. "The 'Feel The Game' campaign celebrates the arrival of FIFA 15 and depicts how players are now so close to the action they can literally feel the emotion of every tackle, save, and goal," the company says.
It will delight fans of the series will not have missed it: last week appeared EA's annual football game FIFA weather in stores. With FIFA 15 EA Sports hopes the FIFA 14 laid the basis to build on. That game was on paper, after all, the first next-gen'-FIFA. As we pointed out at E3: FIFA 15 seems mainly to show why FIFA 14 afterwards might not be regarded as a next-gen game. EA learned this year despite the lessons applied it, and brought the newer engine in passing for the first time to the PC. That alone is of course a good prelude to the release of a new FIFA.
There genuinely was a part of the presentation - given every year when a FIFA game is shown off for the first time to the press - where an EA Sports producer showed us a detailed shoulder comparison between last year's and this year's games. I wish I was making it up.
The biggest change, arguably, to the whole gameplay segment is the revamping of the goalkeepers. Now, they will react much more realistically to shots and be able to make smarter decisions when they need to act as a sweeper. Nonetheless, they are not perfect. I have seen goalkeepers concede silly goals where the shot went under their body or legs akin to real life. But, supposedly, those errors do conform to the realism that EA hopes to achieve with FIFA.
The ratings as a whole seem pretty accurate. The best footballers at the moment in the game, by rating are: Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Manuel Neuer, and Arjen Robben with Andres Iniesta and Luis Suarez not far behind. It's really pretty difficult to argue with that. Where it gets more iffy is when you travel further down the ladder.
Being a Bolton Wanderers supporter, it was easy for me to compare that team in-game to my perceptions of the frankly awful Trotters squad in real life. For some reason, Jermaine Beckford, who couldn't hit the side of the Goodyear Blimp's hangar, is rated a 69 in both shooting and overall which seems a little bit extreme. There are websites like Futhead, which aggregate all of the game's various rankings, and give you a rundown of player potential and growth. According to them, the player with the most growth potential in the game is 18-year-old Shrewsbury Town goalkeeper Callum Burton who may someday go from a 50 to 78 rating in-game which is something.
All in all, FIFA 15 as a top club who has bought attackers, while extra defenders were needed. Due to improvements in goalkeepers and in selecting a tactic FIFA 15 is definitely better than its predecessor, but the TV-style presentation of matches, with emotional responses that are brought in close-up image, is badly paid dividends. That moderates our enthusiasm, even though FIFA 15 the best football game out there. FIFA 15 is available for Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC.
