As you'll see when you look at this review as a whole, I talk about the Ultimate Team part of the game more than the actual football-playing part of the game. Well, that's because you'll spend much more time in menus rather than playing football. First, the positives about the actual kicking the ball part of FIFA 16 UT. The player animations have been improved since previous iterations, with the players moving, kicking, and dribbling more smoothly in FIFA 16 UT. EA claims that it has brought console-quality gameplay to take advantage of the increased power of new mobile devices, and the game does play quite smoothly on my newer devices.
Still EA forgot to add decent servers to this online-only game because four out of five games I played in this online-only game were plagued by constantly-stuttering players, frame rates that dipped to the single digits, and even lovely moments when my counterattacks failed because the frame rate dropped to 1 fps and my player literally wouldn’t move. Mind you, my wireless connection is very robust, so the issues weren’t on my end. The new Draft mode is an interesting compromise between depth and time requirements because it asks the player to put together a team and then offers tournaments that can be completed relatively quickly.
The biggest problem is that the fee linked to the experience is a little high and might keep gamers away from it. It’s an interesting addition to FIFA 16 but nothing groundbreaking, and it will be interesting to see whether Ultimate Team will continue to gain new fans or will mainly appeal to those who are already in love with it. What has changed though whilst playing as these womens teams? That I can tell, not a whole lot has changed to these aspects of the game. To a certain extent I feel like the animations have changed, but this is not really the huge change that EA have been selling us on.
I’m not really sure how EA could have handled it better, but this isn’t enough of a feature to really get excited about if you’re into the Ultimate Team and career modes of the game. Right after you load up FIFA 16 you are immediately thrust into a game. No menus, no picking sides, just go. As someone who plays most sports titles I wasn’t very concerned that I could pick up the controls. Regardless of this, I was pleasantly surprised with a button layout overlay that comes up next to your player as you play the game. These overlays change based off of the situation you are currently in and are non-obstructive.
After playing a bit with the overlay I couldn’t help but think how PES 2016 could have benefited from a similar interface. Both games generally don’t have difficult controls, but it is easy to confuse the two games’ control schemes and this made it easier to remember which buttons did what. The debut of the women’s national teams is also a huge plus. I’ve spent more time trying to help Steph Houghton and Jill Scott win a national tournament than I have anything else thus far.
FIFA Ultimate Team mode has also undergone a face lift with the “draft” mode allowing you to craft a team of all-stars and compete among friends/other online players, and I think that's where the future of the franchise has always been. The solo modes are addictive and will sustain you until next season but there’s nothing sweeter than the rich pageant of online braggadocio. Speaking of staleness, graphically there is not much of a noticeable difference from FIFA 15. EA Sports have improved the lighting ever so slightly, and there is slightly more detail in some players’ facial expressions. However, it is the same old, same old. Generic faces are still the same painfully plain ones we’ve seen since seventh-gen consoles. They look even worse when compared to the detailed and more obvious realism within the scanned faces of the more popular players.
