FIFA 10

Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game’s About
Year after year EA Sports releases the next iteration of each of their popular sports franchises. While Madden enjoys a monopoly, the FIFA series has to continually compete with Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer. The competition between the two series has caused EA Sports to continually seek improvements to the game’s formula, and FIFA 10 brings some of the biggest changes ever seen from one year to the next in any soccer game. Unfortunately the game does suffer from a bit of two steps forward, one step back syndrome, but overall it feels as if FIFA 10 shows that the franchise is trending in a positive direction.

What’s Hot
When I got a chance to meet with some of the EA Canada staff that were presenting the game behind closed doors at E3, I was told that community feedback and criticism was the driving force behind development decisions. Right away it’s apparent that these comments were more than just run of the mill PR fluff. The biggest change from FIFA 09 to FIFA 10 is the introduction of true 360 dribbling. Finally the dribbling in FIFA is as accurate and responsive as we’ve always hoped it would be. This increased accuracy in this part of the game is a huge leap forward for the series.

Secondly, the game has been sped up a noticeable amount. The fields feel smaller, which lead to a more frantic and faster-paced experience. This may be a divisive decision as the game feels much faster than what can be deemed realistic, but I felt like the faster pace was a welcome change. Note: The game speed can be toned down in the options, but I reviewed everything based on default settings.

A bunch of small tweaks and changes that might not individually be that big of a deal combine to really show the developer’s dedication to pushing the series forward. Things like the addition of a quick start after a foul, improved ball physics, better animations, and an overhaul of simple things such as the practice arena are all very much appreciated when taken in aggregate.

What’s Not
Some of the changes made from FIFA 09 to FIFA 10 are very much not for the better. The biggest issue that I personally have is with the decision to remove real life clubs from the Be A Pro (BAP) mode for online play. I can’t count the number of hours spent in FIFA 09 playing BAP mode with real clubs with the maximum allowed players.

The experience was great, but this year nobody is much interested in playing this way due to the unfortunate changes made to the BAP mode.

While it’s not realistic to expect EA Sports to be able to include every team in the world in the game, the omission of certain International teams kind of stings. After getting my fill of playing with the United States squad, I went to pick my emotional favorite country, Chile. As it turns out, Chile isn’t in the game. Other notable teams that will be playing in the World Cup in 2010 aren’t represented here in FIFA 10. It’s truly a shame.

Until now, the only complaints I’ve have had no bearing on gameplay, but unfortunately it seems that some of the ambition that EA Canada had for pushing FIFA 10 forward took its toll on some quality control. As I progressed through the game’s modes, I have encountered a few glitches and bugs that ranged from the inconvenient up to absolutely unforgivable. The worst of all glitches basically killed my ability to advance in Manager Mode, a mode that is the biggest boon to the game’s replayability outside of online play. To make matters worse, the game’s auto-save ensured that the glitch became a permanent deal. At this point I either had to start fresh and begin a new manager mode from scratch, or I could abandon it all together and move on. The glitch left me so sour that I chose the latter option. After doing some search engine research, it seems that the glitch is not all that uncommon, and as of writing this review, EA Sports has no plans to address this specific issue. Calling this unfortunate is a major understatement.

Final Word
I’ve been playing FIFA games for quite a while, and some time around 2006 or so is when I felt that EA Sports had finally pulled ahead of Konami for having the best soccer game. Since that point I’ve had some favorite years (FIFA 07, for example) and some years that disappointed me (FIFA 08 most notably); and I feel like FIFA 10 could have been my favorite if it weren’t for the awful change to the BAP mode and the worst glitch I’ve ever dealt with in a sports game. I love the new dribbling system and many of the other improvements that FIFA 10 brought to the table this year, but in the end it’s unforgivable for a developer to harm an online mode so blatantly and for a glitch to literally bring down the house on what is arguably the game’s most important mode. Maybe FIFA 11 will address these issues and I’ll have a new favorite in the series, but this time around EA Sports has struck the crossbar.