Where FIFA games usually concentrate on the club sides, these major-event side releases focus on the national teams and so you are getting less of a game here. There’s no league, cup, or Champions League to worry about. There’s also no transfers or management, and that means no Ultimate Team either. Yep, EA’s cash-grabbing football Pokemon mode is skipped, which is great because Ultimate Team is a complete and utter cunt of a mode anyway.

 

Training has also been integrated into player development across all game modes. Between matches you can take four players and run them through drills (which includes skill games and other new additions) to improve their stats. This allows a greater level of customization and a chance to plug team weaknesses you couldn’t before. In an attempt to balance lobbed through balls, EA has practically nerfed them entirely. Crossing has also been affected, with EA clearly studying at the school of Nani: many attempts fail to beat the first defender. Like heading in 14, hopefully a patch can address this.

 

A nice touch is that you can skip the ever-annoying EA Trax soundtrack and switch to a radio-style broadcast by some actual talk radio hosts which helps to build the atmosphere, but ultimately none of it really means anything. I’ve been playing FIFA games since FIFA Road to World Cup ’98 and so I’ve seen all this before and I’m going to skip every cutscene anyway, generally. Now I didn’t do that for the purposes of this review but I actually pressed ‘A’ once too often when I finally won the World Cup and it skipped all the celebrations. It’s that easy to avoid.

 

Those looking for glimpses of what may be in store for FIFA 15 will be disappointed as almost all of the elements from FIFA 14 are in the game. The menus are brightly colored in the colors of the host nation and the menus, with very slight changes, are pretty much the same from the past FIFA iteration. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Thus this may also answer why there will be no Next-Gen version of the World Cup. The demo itself does allow for a full game with most of the similar looks and sounds from previous FIFA iterations. Also in the demo, the commentary is given by Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend. One small noticeable difference is that there is more fan interaction and cutaways in combination with the festive atmosphere.

 

Of course you don’t get the keys to the entire footballing kingdom for free. But as long as you’ve got EA’s Origin client on your PC, you can download FIFA World free of charge and jump into two different game modes.

 

As you might expect, the actual on-field product isn’t quite up to the standard set by FIFA 14, either visually or in terms of gameplay. The action feels a bit slow, and you won’t have the mind-numbing variety of offensive moves to use (or remember, which is the good part). FIFA World still plays decently enough, and the tougher difficulty settings will certainly make you earn your goals. Controls aren’t horrible, and you have three different schemes from which to choose: keyboard and mouse, keyboard only or gamepad. The graphics are also a notch below what you’d see in the regular game but still have enough detail in player faces that all of the stars are recognizable, and the tremendous variety of clubs and kits that you’d expect from the brand remains intact.