Setting up a career mode takes quite a while. It's not just a case of having a quick game, as you need to organize your team and get the many systems just how you want them. But then, after that it's very much business as usual. You’re potentially managing one of the biggest names in the world of sport, yet you never take the spotlight, and there are no press conferences of note. In other genres (many shooters do this now) you'll be rewarded for playing one mode, by being given treats and incentives to go and play the others. With Ultimate Team being such a huge draw, why not offer players a reason to keep playing career mode? Imagine if you got given a special loan card, or even just coins for playing through a season in FIFA as a manager. It’d certainly stop the slow fade that it currently has, because we certainly get bored of career mode long before the second season has started these days.

 

When FIFA 07 came out for what was then “next-gen” as the first real next-gen soccer game (FIFA 06 was merely a port on Xbox 360), it signaled a new era for the redheaded stepchild of the EA Sports family. Whereas Madden probably peaked the year before, and NCAA was about to peak in the eyes of many, FIFA had been chugging along, more revered for its soundtracks than its actual gameplay. And while the 07 edition was a rough entry into the series, it laid the groundwork for what was to come, as early as the next year. This game shows the behavior of each one of the 22 players in the field in an individual way and, related to the events of the match. For example, a player can be happy because his team is winning 2-1, but at the same time, he can be angry with a team member who is not playing good, or because his nemesis in the field has scored the goal.

 

As I was preparing to start my AC Milan career mode in FIFA 16, I was initially struck with how similar it all felt to last year, same menus, same options, same bare bones manager creation options. This feeling of déjà vu followed me into just about every other area as well. Youth scouting, news stories, the Global Transfer Network, transfers, it’s all more or less the same as last year with some refinement added in. I couldn’t help but feel let down by it all. However, the main new feature and the most noticeable one is the emotional intelligence of the players. There is a great variety of emotional situations when playing football, millions of reactions and relations between players who can be angry, happy, revengeful, kind, etc. 

 

You also have the option of instantly playing whatever match is scheduled for them next in the real-life season (though this won’t rip through spacetime and affect the real league table - sorry). Regardless of who you’re playing as or against, there are lots of neat little touches during gameplay that pleasingly mimic what you’d see on a real pitch. For one thing, the crowd (finally) looks like a proper crowd made up of individual people, rather than a competent afterthought. In the scenes that play out after a particularly physical or controversial foul, players sometimes shout at and push one another, just like the consummate professionals they emulate. Said emulation is also the best it’s ever been here. Animation is spot on and, while player likenesses still aren’t perfect, everybody is still instantly recognisable despite (because of) the fact that most of them look like their heads are made out of plasticine.

 

That's no bad thing, though. FIFA has done a good job over the last half decade of avoiding regular instances of scorelines that look as though they belong to basketball or American football. To change such a thing now would be to change the nature of an incredibly popular series. Having said that, it's now somewhat easier to score the kind of goals that you'd expect to see in an end-of-season highlight reel. Goalkeepers might be that much better at stopping long shots, but truly outrageous efforts seem to find the twine more often than you'd reasonably expect.

 

These changes in FIFA 16 sound fiddly, but in realistic terms these add more to the game by making it a bit more technical. Newbies don’t need to worry, but those of us in the professional/world class tier will have a new challenge to accept. In FIFA 16 with Bayern Munich I destroyed Barcelona. In FIFA 16 I lost 3-1. One big change comes in the form of the recent Ignite engine coming to PC. But if you’re a PC gamer, make sure you invest in a console controller.