Career Mode in FIFA 16 honors its ardent fanbase by adding two features they’ve requested for the longest - pre-season tournaments and player training. Your team now has an even easier time developing into the championship caliber squad you want it to be. Your players can dabble in pre-season games to get their team synergy tighter and keep your custom player busy. The option to play or simulate the training of different skills for any player on your team helps gradually increase their play on the field and keeps everyone on a level playing field skills-wise.

 

Pace and power are still as important as they are at the top of the real game - you only have to look at the physique Gareth Bale has developed since moving to Real Madrid for evidence of that - but it’s now a lot harder for players to get away from their markers in a one-on-one foot race. Faster, more skillful players can now use no-touch dribbling to get past their markers instead, which involves holding L1/LB to literally stop touching the ball, tempting the defender into trying to take it off them before bursting away into space. At least, that’s the theory. To begin with you’ll often just surrender possession but when you get it right it works brilliantly, allowing you to get half a yard on a man without resorting to extravagant tricks or flicks.

 

The most important aspects of any football game are how it plays and how realistic a simulation it manages to be. It's safe to say that FIFA has never played better - at least on mobile. And that's largely thanks to the vastly improved AI the new engine has brought with it. Players now actively try to win back the ball and mark other players when defending, and make forward runs or move into space for a pass when attacking. The physics are also much better. Gone are the days when every player had the turning circle of a tank or the first touch of Messi.

 

There are also lots of improvements for when you don’t have the ball. While many of the new changes on the defensive side are incredibly minor on their own, when put together they make winning the ball back a lot easier. Quicker turning animations, better AI tracking of runners, and the ability to jump up out of a missed slide tackle with a single button press to keep momentum make defending the best it has been for years, and the most enjoyable, to boot. Add in the much improved (providing you play on professional or higher) goalkeepers, and goals start to become much more of a rarity. Whereas a 3-2 or 4-3 would be classed as a close game in previous years, this year a 1-0 win is the more common score line.

 

Sadly, thirteen players had to be removed from the roster just a week before launch because the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the United States was apparently looking into whether or not the players involved were violating eligibility rules that would make them ineligible at the collegiate level. For those of you in Europe who are reading this, a quick explanation is that collegiate players cannot have their likenesses used in any way, shape, or form. While the players did not receive any compensation for this, EA Sports had no choice but to remove them from the game.

 

The handling of the ladies game has a slower unpolished kink to it, almost as if their model build was taken from a men’s practice scrimmage. Player likeness also lacks some of the fine detail we see with their gender counterparts. Currently, you are only able to play with the women’s squads in either tournament or free play. Hopefully in future installments, all available game modes will be playable with both genders.

 

While an annual franchise, EA Sports has been very good about making each FIFA release worth buying and that is once again the case with FIFA 16. There are no absolute game changers in the gameplay, but there is just enough to make the gameplay more authentic than ever. Building off an already great game last year, the addition of Women’s National Teams, albeit limited in use, as well as the new FUT Draft easily make FIFA 16 yet another entry in this long running series that should not be passed.