Within the space of a 48 hour period, I had two of the best games of football I've had in ages - one on FIFA 22, one on Football Manager 2022.
Which is why it's so frustrating that bugs like AI strikers playing in defence etc. never, ever get fixed. Even more frustrating is the skating and secretly sliding along the floor into position (to ensure you/they win a header, for example). The animation is genuinely the worst I've seen in a modern FIFA title, all for responsiveness' sake.
They truly don't care about us, and any benefits we get from a patch are A) thanks to FUT changes or B) thanks to one high-profile Twitter complaint at a time (i.e. the skinny arms).
But, despite this, I am having some really good games after the last patch:
I'd played (as Tranmere) against some lower-league teams in the pre-season competition on World Class and beat several convincingly, and I thought to myself, here's the big challenge (to see if the game is actually improved)... The "semi-final" against Udinese, who should have absolutely battered me.
I thought - how will their better ability be represented? Will they ping-pong around me in a physically impossible fashion, will they just be much faster than me, or will they be better than me because of the quality of their play? To my surprise, it was largely the latter. They were 1-0 up after 15 minutes.
What shocked me most was that, after about 20 minutes, Deulofeu performed a slide-tackle for a 50/50 ball and absolutely snapped my midfielder in half (who's now out for three months), and got sent off. It didn't look "forced" - it looked fairly natural - and again, I wondered what would happen now.
But the difficulty didn't really drop. Udinese played a decent passing game, and they scored a second just before full-time. I couldn't get through their defence, and with them seemingly playing more defensively, it felt absolutely right that it should feel that way.
The difference between each match was fairly obvious, and that is key for me (a football game lives and dies by its AI in my opinion). If it stays like this, I can squeeze a season or two in and enjoy myself before FIFA 23...