FIFA 15 Review

FIFA 15 Review

FIFA 15 is another of EA’s sports juggernauts. With a game released once a year, EA has established itself as the sports game authority. But unlike Madden FIFA has some competition from Konami’s PES. So how does FIFA 15 stack up? Read on.

Let’s start out with the good just to get off on a positive note. This game looks good. Graphics are nice on the current gen consoles. The players look realistic compared to the olden days of sports titles. Electronic Arts has seemingly spent much time as of late trying to make their sports games feel like you are watching a match or contest on television. They add eye candy and lots of television like bling to pull this off. Don’t get me wrong, this is cool. It is important to those who want to play a career mode athlete and watch him take the field with your favorite team and all the famous names. We like the announcers commenting on a play we made and really appreciate the feel of taking part in the show rather than playing a game. This is great, but what about game play? Does it even matter? The answer is a resounding yes.

Now we have to cut programmers a little slack. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to create a realistic player AI doing realistic things. Sadly, FIFA 15 does not accomplish this.

Players will run into each other often falling to the ground to make your goal seem like a huge vacuum. A player may raise his hands in the air while the ball is stolen away, leaving you thinking, “what the ___?(add your own expletive here.) Not to mention how a slow defender can run down a speedster. Oh, and don’t even get me started on those brick walls EA passes off for goaltenders! Okay, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration but I sure can’t block shots like the computer can.

Which leads us to the very much hated practice of scripting in video games. For those of you who are unaware, scripting is the practice of artificially leveling out the playing field by increasing the computer’s(or the losing player’s) skills and chances of making plays or blocks, etc while decreasing the player in the lead. FIFA 15 has been greatly criticized by gamers for using this practice in this game.

We get that challenge is fun, but it should not be so unrealistic as to become, well, stupid, as with the examples I cited in a previous paragraph. Of course, we need to again point out how difficult a developers job is trying to please thousands of hungry competitive sports fans with realistic action. It is easy for me to complain about such nuances but difficult to fix.

Still, the experience of getting “ripped off” by a horrible AI is just frustrating and not rewarding at all. Which is why we play games, mainly to have fun, but also to create a sense of achievement when things go well for us in game.

I will not bash announcer commentating here, as this issue of being repetitive or just sounding fake exists in every sports game. FIFA 15 does try to improve it by quoting stats for players from 2014 and saying which side of the net the ball hits, but it doesn’t yet come close to real announcer banter. Again this is something that must be very difficult to obtain but how great would it be if someone could somehow pull it off?

I suppose if you love EA’s FIFA franchise, you will also like this game. As I said earlier, the game looks good and does give the feel of watching a match on television. Features like Ultimate Team are interesting but as I have said before in other reviews, I am not a fan of in-game micro purchases, especially when you have already shelled out $60 for the game in the first place.

I give FIFA 15 5.5 stars out of ten.