Software In News

Review: FIFA Football

22.05.12

So one thing’s probably on every PlayStation Vita-owning, football fan’s mind: is this year’s handheld FIFA game any good, or is it just another broken, under-developed port of its exemplary console brethren? Well, lucky for you, I have some good news. FIFA Football is quite possibly the most polished game of soccer you’ll ever play on a small screen, thanks in no small part to its ability to imprint the console mechanics onto the Vita. Even though Vita’s FIFA box art has been guised as a FIFA 12 port, both the Player Impact Engine and Tactical Defending features have been stripped from this game. This is more FIFA 11. And for this game and I, that’s good news.

Despite the FIFA series continually evolving into a more realistic simulation of football, some players (like me) haven’t really had the time to adapt and perfect the new defense mechanics like everyone else. If you’re familiar with the franchise at all, you’ll know that defense for the last few years has been holding two buttons down to pressure the other team into coughing up the ball. You hold “X” to magnetize your player to the ball, and you hold Square to call another teammate to do your dirty work to nab it from the opposing team. Simple. While it portrays two homing missiles chasing a ball better than it does real life defense strategies, some players (again, like me) do prefer to press the opposition. For Law school students without very much console FIFA 12 time, this iteration is as good as it gets. It works in my favour, as I loved FIFA 11. Other than the aforementioned discrepancies (plus the omission of Ultimate Trading) with FIFA 12, there’s not much else to complain about. The crucial thing to get here is not what’s missing, but what’s intact in this portable football game.

Source: VGChartz