Another year, another FIFA. If there is one annual franchise, other than Call of Duty, that has managed to find itself in the hands of millions of gamers every year, it is EA’s FIFA. Being an annual franchise, it makes it next to impossible for the developers to showcase genre defining changes with every iteration.
However, there are several small tweaks that have gone into FIFA 17’s gameplay, the sum of whose parts actually makes for some decent feeling football at the end of the day.
Selling that to a crowd of eager gamers is difficult, so EA went ahead and, for the first time, added in a narrative based single player mode to FIFA called “The Journey”. Powered by EA’s much talked about Frostbite engine, The Journey as well as the TV style cinematics that the FIFA franchise is now renowned for, really shine. You play as Alex Hunter, an eighteen-year-old prodigy who want to make it huge in football world.
While some parts of the story mode felt like playing Goal: The Game, there were enough moments of genuine emotion and weight that somehow managed to actually suck me in to Alex’s life and actually have me invested in what I was doing. The bottom line with The Journey is that it offers a beefed up version of the Be A Pro mode that was found in FIFA’s previous, with a lot of cut-scenes and dialogue thrown in. Essentially, this is a great mode for new comers to the franchise to acclimatise themselves with the game’s mechanics and may offer some seasoned players the opportunity to hone the more advanced skills in the game.
The Journey aside, the majority of your time in FIFA 17 will be spent playing FIFA Ultimate Team. Here, too, EA has managed to spice things up by offering more in terms of challenges and rewards to keep players coming back.
One such new feature are squad builder challenges. They add a unique incentive for you to hold on to your bronze and silver players that you get from packs as you never know when you might need to drop some player in to meet the challenge requirements.
Overall, there is enough here in this year’s FIFA to warrant a purchase. In fact, outside of The Journey, the little tweaks to throw-ins, corners, penalties, corners and hold up play make the gameplay feel significantly different from and better than its predecessor and make online play rather fun.
The one complaint that I always have had with FIFA are the atrocious servers — I swear, I am one more disconnect away from chucking my controller across the room!
