Bought yesterday both Fifa and PES at my usual shop.
FIFA is getting raped quickly by the developers themselves, that's the only thing I can think of.
Almost everything in the game has been improved... except the game itself. Some insights:
- Tackling: Noob tackling totally destroys this game.
- Movement: here is a video of what I think the movement of Fifa is based on:
YouTube - Disney On Ice Let's Celebrate
- P-my-ass+: You can see some P+ in that previous video too. Goofy and Peter Pan have slightly different speeds when they run. Well, it may sound so far fetched, but there's not much personality there. Some players will be slightly faster (but as defenders can catch you up, what does it matter?) but all of them can control and move with the ball with total impunity until they're tackled again and again (right stick to put the ball ahead works exactly the same for all players....wtf).
First touch almost non existant (it's there 1 out of every 30 controls, it seems), all players can pass practically the same (ProPassing is noticeable and slightly reduces ping-pong, but makes practically no difference overall).
You don't feel different "types of player" in the game, Amauri may be a great header specialist, but moves with the ball almost the same as Xavi or Messi. He's not that fast but he's stronger.... mmm, Fifa 10.5?
- Manual controls have gone shit in my oppinion. You're seriously handicapped with manual this year, since it's not that manual anyway and deffensive AI has been empowered by totally ignoring the laws of physics, so it's brutally impossible to play realistic passes, nice through balls or intrincate passing in the midfield.
- Strength vs skill: they only made Iniesta and Xavi faster and quicker, pretending that would make them better, and they can evade from defenders by doing absurdly unrealistic turns. But they can't simply wrong foot anyone. I still can achieve the same (and a plus), with any strong DMF (usually the man of the match...). By the way, Iniesta tackles as well as Pique or Puyol.
- CPU AI: pathetic. Worse in FIFA next gen by far. They do absurd tricks now and there, they play pixel perfect everything and all that we already know. But this year they don't seem to play a team sport. A CPU player will take the ball and run with it 30 meters, trying to dribble everything in his way, automatically "retacling" when you tackle him, and if they are not dispossessed (just hold a button and sprint towards them), they may sometimes pass it to another player. I haven't seen any smart teamplay in more than 30 matches.
- Midfield is a tackle fest now and then, an the amount of people falling to the ground reminds me of this:
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/2698613/Hulton-Archive
- A little non important detail: EA has a curious tendency of doing things. Last year a lot of people said there were no diping shots in the game, so this year practically all the shots in the arena ARE diping shots. Try to shoot in the arena for a while, it gets absolutely ridiculous the amount of shots with extraordinary dip. I'm annoyed at the tendency they have to put the new things extremely visible so they can claim them in the box. Then you go to the actual game and see that shooting is quite good, in fact, maybe the best thing of the game!
I could go on and on and on... right now this game feels
flat and boring, rewards build up less than before (it rewards running towards any opposition holding tackle, that's what it rewards mainly), is
a lesser simulation of real matches and tactics and
introduces new flaws to an already flawed game, while only slightly fixing some.
You may love it for what it does and because technically is vastly superior to it's opponent, but it's the most arcade game in this generation of consoles and doesn't fix any of the flaws most of the people had. They will need to change a lot of things for me to buy another version.
I may play a bit more to try to save something out of the full package, but VERY disappointed by now. I was extremely disgusted with the demo and the final product is way off what I want in a footy game. Lucky me, I can give the game to a friend that wanted to buy it.
I spent months playing full manual CM in Fifa 10. I WON'T spend more than 2 weeks playing this, maybe less. It's a mess of a game, it's a caricature of Fifa 10 (which was a caricature of Fifa 09, etc...).
Another rant bites the dust.