The Fifa 16 Ultimate Team offers some new features as well
Almost as hotly-contested as the Ballon d'or, people are always eager to know who will top FIFA's best players list when it comes to stats. Electronic Arts has made the top 50 players list available. EA assigns ratings based around Pace, Dribbling, Shooting, Defending, Passing and Physical attributes to decide how well each player performs. You'll need to take into account the player's position, too. A high defensive stat for a striker probably isn't your highest priority. The only possible surprise is the inclusion of Manuel Neuer, a goalkeeper, in the top five. Interestingly, Lionel Messi has pipped Cristiano Ronaldo, the 2014 FIFA Ballon d'or to the coveted top spot. But maybe it isn't that surprising considering Lionel Messi is FIFA 16's cover star. The Spanish league's two biggest clubs feature heavily with the remaining spots taken up evenly by the English, French and German leagues.
And so that is everything, in terms of its gameplay pillars, which no doubt is the area on which I place the most importance when judging FIFA. But FIFA’s success during the last few years has been as much to do with the collecting and trading compulsions of Ultimate Team as it’s been about actual (pretend) football. So the arrival of Draft mode, a significant addition to Ultimate Team, is also worth a good look. Draft mode sits aside from the main business of buying packs, building teams, and playing them against opposition online. It’s like a paid-entry one-off Ultimate Team tournament, in which players build a temporary team position by position, opening a pack for every slot and deciding which player inside best fits the side under construction. The finished team is then played against other Draft players, with bigger than usual coin rewards for a winning run (the maximum streak is four wins).
FIFA’s popular FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) mode returns, bringing with it the great Draft mode that, while shockingly overpriced, is still a great mini-game for FUT fanatics. FUT has always been a highly rewarding mode, although I would still like to see its UI cleaned up a bit to simplify a lot of those team and transfer managing elements. Nonetheless, FUT is still a great managerial mode, one that challenges the player with expectations of patience and long-haul commitment. Starting off with a team of spuds is hardly inspiring, but FUT 16, just like those before it, finds ways to keep you engaged. Last year’s version marked a major departure in terms of gameplay-instead of the multiple-mode format where you could play as one of the leading clubs, the game moved to a single mode where you had to build a team from scratch, buy multiple stadiums and players, and compete with them in online leagues.
The developer, Electronic Arts (EA), has carried forward that mode to this year’s version as well. The Fifa 16 Ultimate Team offers some new features as well, like player exchange, which allows you to trade your players for others; and you don’t have to worry about renewing player or manager contracts this time. Every year, FIFA touts things that are “enhanced.”One year it was goalkeepers. The next year, it was ball physics. This year, we have defense. These enhancements come in the form of improved tackling, team support, and interception intelligence. Yeah, soccer is like that. Many passes don’t find their intended recipients, but a lot of this stuff doesn’t feel organic or natural. And this is a common consequence of yearly releases. Sometimes, settings get dialed up a little too much, messing with the overall flow. It happened with the heroic goalies before (which never really got fixed). Now, we’re getting it with the precognitive defenders.
It may be passéto say, but FIFA 16 is a game of two halves. Off the field, not much has changed that you could really write home about. The stalwarts of career mode and Ultimate Team feel much the same as they did before with very minor changes. With the ball at your feet though, the tooth-and-nail fights to hold on to a 1-0 lead against superior opposition or to take advantage of an entirely organic mistake to equalise in the final knocking of a lower league cup match, along with the general feeling that you're taking part in a decent tactical battle are stellar. The things EA hasn't shouted about are the things that they've clearly worked the hardest on and while there are still flaws, this is the best on-pitch representation of the beautiful game since Konami's PlayStation 2 efforts.
