FIFA 17 Review – Xbox One

The FIFA series is always a difficult one to evaluate after only a week or two of playing, as subtle nuances in the gameplay tend to only reveal themselves after weeks or even months of playing. Still, there’s enough new content within FIFA 17 at release to evaluate whether or not it’s a step up on last year’s effort, and with additions to Career Mode and Ultimate Team, as well as an entirely new mode in The Journey, there’s a lot to explore.

Much of EA Sports’ marketing drive with FIFA 17 has concentrated on The Journey, a game mode where you take on the role of Alex Hunter, a rising star in English football, and attempt to guide him through his first season with a Premier League club. You start the mode by choosing which team to support, and then following a trial which tests your abilities with the game, you are given a choice of which Premier League team you want to sign for. Following this, Alex’s story is told through a series of short cutscenes delivered at a fairly regular pace, and featuring a cast of characters who, while not exceptionally well-written, you’ll soon come to know and either admire or despise.

Unfortunately, doesn’t really give players much of a chance to customize their particular experience with the mode, aside from choosing which team to play for, and because of this, there won’t be much variation from one player’s experience to the next. While you can choose Alex Hunter’s reactions and responses to some of the situations he finds himself in, and your actions on the pitch can have some effect on those who Alex surrounds himself with, you’ll still find yourself experiencing the same narrative as if you took the opposite course of action at every turn. This means that The Journey often ends up playing out as a version of FIFA’s already established Be A Pro mode, though with an extra gloss of context and motivation.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy my time with The Journey, but rather that it perhaps isn’t the groundbreaking innovation that EA Sports might have potential players thinking it is. Growing up in England, there weren’t many people I knew as a child who didn’t have some sort of aspiration or secret dream of becoming a professional footballer and experiencing Alex Hunter’s first tentative steps into a career in the Premier League definitely provided me with a weird sense of dream fulfillment, as if it was me walking onto the pitch at Old Trafford or Stamford Bridge.

It’s easy to sense a lot of potential within The Journey, and it’s possible that it could become a strong base for the FIFA series in the future if it continues in future entries. The Journey certainly serves as a strong starting point for those unfamiliar with the FIFA series and goes a long way to teaching players about game mechanics and the culture of professional football as a whole.

Though The Journey may soon become a hallmark of EA Sports’ series, for now, the main draw to the game for many players is the Ultimate Team mode. One of the biggest attractions of Ultimate Team is creating a virtual team of players that you likely wouldn’t see together in real life, and FIFA 17 attempts to bottle this attraction with the introduction of Squad Building Challenges. I’ve never been particularly interesting in building so-called hybrid squads, which mix player leagues or nationalities, but this is exactly what these challenges encourage you to do, and I have to admit that I’ve greatly enjoyed them.

Squad Building Challenges effectively work as puzzles within the game, and the rewards on offer are just enough to encourage you to devote your time to them, without ruining the sense of progression in the game. With regular updates to this mode in the form of new challenges devoted to certain players, teams or real-world events, I’m interested to see where EA Sports take Squad Building Challenges, and it’s certainly an addition that has grabbed my attention.

Outside of game modes, another huge change to the FIFA series is the disposal of the Ignite engine, with FIFA 17 instead running on Frostbite. Though it might not initially seem like a huge change, with eleven men still facing eleven men on a football pitch, once you begin playing you can almost immediately feel the difference. Players both look and feel more like human beings, with player likenesses being at an all-time high, and taller players feeling noticeably different to control than smaller players.

Physical play has also been overhauled, meaning that stronger players actually feel stronger, and with the side effect of removing the player collision issues that plagued FIFA 16. Players also now make much more intelligent runs and off the ball movements, which helps create the feeling that you’re playing with a team of footballers, rather than a series of eleven players that only make intelligent moves when you happen to be controlling them.

Along with Frostbite, presentation generally within FIFA 17 is as slick as ever, with a host of various licenses and a menu system and soundtrack that feel like a step forward from previous entries. However, I experienced two particularly grating presentation issues, one of which has been with the series for a number of entries, and one which is new to FIFA 17. Firstly, though FIFA’s commentary has always been noticeably better than that on offer in other football games, it’s been a number of years since there’s been a significant update to the lines of commentary available in-game, and hearing Martin Tyler and Alan Smith repeat themselves game after game, year after year is starting to test my patience to its limits. There are occasional contextual updates to the script, such as how a certain team fared last season, but once these lines have been trotted out in two or three games, they soon lose their freshness.

The other bugbear I experienced was with a new feature to FIFA 17, the inclusion of avatars for Premier League managers. Though some of them are impeccable, such as Pep Guardiola of Manchester City and Jose Mourinho of Manchester United, some of the lesser teams have manager models that look like they’ve been processed through the mangled remains of a broken gameface app. I’m a Watford fan, and as anyone who follows football will know, we’ve been through a fair few managers in the last five or so years. So, when I played as Watford and saw the manager model on show, I figured that they hadn’t had time to do an avatar model for our most recent manager, Walter Mazzarri, and that they’d instead put in a placeholder. However, upon gazing upon some of the other managers on offer in the Premier League, I realized that Mazzarri isn’t the only manager whose avatar bears less than a passing likeness to the real person.

Admittedly, it’s not a huge issue in terms of gameplay, but us fans of lesser teams in the Premier League are used to being passed over in favor of bigger clubs, so we tend to get excited about little things such as having our manager in a videogame. To see it done so poorly is a shame and considering the inclusion of managers played a big part in the trailers for FIFA 17, it’s unfortunate that many of their virtual models are so hideous.

FIFA 17 isn’t one of the entries in the series that changes enough to feel like a must-buy, and if you’re happy still playing FIFA 16, then you may well feel justified in holding off on purchasing a new football game until next year. However, the switch to the Frostbite engine and the inclusion of The Journey, as well as smaller updates to other modes means that those who do purchase FIFA 17 won’t feel as if they don’t have enough content to last them through the season. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing how FIFA 17 grows over the next twelve months, and with the foundation showed by my first few days with the game, FIFA 17 is almost certainly going to be in constant rotation on my console for months to come.

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Author: Jack Moulder
Born in England but currently living in Toronto, Canada, Jack's been gaming as long as he can remember, which just happens to coincide with his 6th birthday, where he received an original Gameboy and a copy of Tetris, which his parents immediately 'borrowed' and proceeded to rack up all the high scores that Jack's feeble 6-year-old fingers couldn't accomplish. A lover of sports games, RPGs and shooters, Jack's up for playing pretty much anything, so long as it doesn't kick his ass too frequently. He has a delicate temperament.

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