In real life, it would have been considered a dive but due to the fact you can’t dive in FIFA 15, it’s a mechanical error. Goalkeepers have been tweaked to be a force to be reckoned with. Unless you finesse shot in a one on one situation, that ball isn’t going in the net as keepers are spectacularly nimble and agile. In FIFA 14, one on one’s were game enders, the striker would have undoubtedly sunk it in the bottom corner, in FIFA 15 though, and keepers seemingly have big hands and the agility of a cat. Aside from all of that mentioned, FIFA still plays like FIFA, you can still pull off some amazing looking blinders in the top corner and whizz past players leaving them wondering what happened.
A nice touch to the gameplay is the loading screens, which are small mini games designed for you to practice dribbling, shoot accuracy or dodging. A superb little warmup before a big game. The player animations are a treat to watch, however there are times where the bugs rears it's ugly head. With so many animations and artificial intelligence code flying around, you will find the odd player stuck in an animation. Also over the course of a game you will find the animation slowly getting a bit jittery, not quite as smooth and seamless. If you're tired of just setting up matches, you can play through the career mode, follow news on Match Day live. There's a lot of content for soccer fans as you can customize your own ultimate team, set and customize your teams tactics and a lot more out of a staggering roster of teams including the Premiere League teams, stadiums and games.
The supremely popular FIFA 15 Ultimate Team mode shares this highlight reel feel, with star players now available on short loan periods for those times when you can't afford to purchase them outright. Rather than grind out those tough early victories using your team of journeyman footballers, you can now just loan the likes of Lionel Messi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, immediately making you feel like the manager of a credible team. It's this conflict more than any other that dominates my thoughts after a week with FIFA 15. Next-gen aesthetic improvements aside, is it any better a gameplay experience than any FIFA before it? More pertinently, is it even possible to say? Let's start with the certainties. FIFA 15 is, in purely technical terms, stunningly impressive. The player models, though a little top heavy, have taken another huge stride towards photorealism, and the renewed match atmosphere effects - team sheets being read out, player emotions, licensed stadiums, authentic terrace chants, to name but a few - combine to create a real wow factor for the first few games you play.
Players' emotions and reactions will be mostly visible in the replays, though. Big misses will finish with a shot of a player patting the goalkeeper on the back, and cheap goals will often see a frustrated goalie (especially one who has been taking a lot of shots) lashing out, presumably at his defenders. On its own, player emotion would need to be a lot more demonstrative to be counted as an improvement worth mentioning. But combined with the raucous crowd atmosphere (which got a huge boost in last year's FIFA 14) and a better broadcast package to showcase it all, FIFA 15 is better than any other sports video game at communicating the feeling of everyone in the moment, where its peers offer only pure crowd volume and expository dialogue from the commentators.
Not that FIFA hasn’t always been about money. EA has never made FIFA from a sense of duty or sporting spiritualism. But now it has devised a machine capable of monetising the adulation of role-models with a precision that overshadows how the game imitates and celebrates the sport itself. FIFA 15 Ultimate Team is brilliantly designed and compelling, but it’s also the Premier League-ification of FIFA - it represents a different joy, a different compulsion. It’s not an attempt to simulate football and all its pleasures - at least, not football the Platonic notion of figures on a field exploring shape and movement with a ball. It is football the industry, the marketing machinery. It is an uncanny representation of the capitalist framework that has constructed itself around the sport, a framework that turns skilled young men into commodities and trades them accordingly. Off the pitch, FIFA 15 is an incredible package. YouTube favorite, FIFA 15 Ultimate Team, returns with the ability to loan star players, and is as life-consuming as you want it to be, while the online Seasons mode (and its coop brother) are as captivating as ever. It should be said that online FIFA is a subtly different game - the latency is imperceptible, but in such a physics-driven simulation, even tiny delays in input can effect how you dribble and shoot. As such it tends to focus more on pace and high-through balls in favor of tactical build up.
