FIFA 14’s mountainous molehills begin with a small tweak to player momentum. Playing FIFA 13 meant keeping your finger permanently pinned down on sprint, hurtling your team of millionaires around at unlikely speeds. Do that now as a defender, and a brief sidestep can see you moving in the wrong direction with a significant amount of time required to turn around. Do it as the attacker, and well-timed challenge will remove the ball from your feet. Ball physics have been adjusted so that aerial passes now have a flatter parabola, for example, often bouncing out of play rather than landing with generous backspin, and you can’t get through a match without a dramatic bicycle-kicked clearance from a defender. Presumably both are attempts to reduce the potency of pace and over-the-top passes.
Likewise, the way the defenders react more quickly, closing down the player in possession and putting in a pair of standing tackles rather than a single lunge for the ball, should stop attackers racing past them before they can react. Right-stick trick moves, meanwhile, no longer require you to hold the left trigger, making them more accessible, and the abandoned trigger button is now clamped down to protect the ball under duress. Players also take a little longer to get the ball out of their feet now, and the way they push off with it and accelerate has changed as well. In theory, all of this should slow the game down.
Off the pitch, things are largely the same, with modes like Head to Head Seasons, Ultimate Team, Online Friendlies, Virtual Pro, and Manager to play through, but they remain the most comprehensive and compelling you’ll find in a football game. Real-world statistics ensure that every team is kept up to date before the start of every match, while the excellent EA Sports Football Club keeps track of any points earned and ties them to a real-world team for a ranking on a global league table.
A slick new interface that mimics that of the Xbox 360 dashboard not only looks far better than its predecessor, but also keeps the action flowing smoothly in Career mode thanks to a simpler layout and navigation that lets you access all the core functions with just a few flicks of the analogue stick. Latin American soccer fans will be disappointed to hear that Mario Kempes and Fernando Palomo’s commentary is not in the next-gen version either. Unranked online friendlies have also been taken out, as has the ability to allow guests to play online with you. All in all, this means the local co-op play experience has been rather handicapped. It’s a disappointing blot on an otherwise outstanding product.
So FIFA might have become a gestalt monster built from aggregated feature sets and riveted together by the bullet points of key annual PR messaging, but is it, you know, good? The big answer to this question is that we’re not currently experiencing a golden era of football games. The more specific answer is that, yes, it is quite good, with a couple of minor caveats and a more general creeping dissatisfaction with the strategic tendencies of the game's iterative development schedule.
Like every year the gameplay changes make for challenges to overcome, and returning to FIFA 13 suddenly feels dated and arcade-like. With FIFA 14, everyone’s favourite football franchise is still top of the league, for now. You know this by now - things in EA Sports land either get slightly better or slightly worse, and whatever side of the dial the year’s instalment ticks into, what you're getting remains the same: the most fun and feature-rich sports games on the planet, still.
