I got it last night, it's a good game, very playable. Passing is crisp, defending is generally very good and you can build up nice attacking play.
I am dissapointed by the lack of licences though. A cursory glance through the teams revealed the following all had fake names and kits:-
Belarus (e.g. Hliev instead of Hleb), Macedonia (e.g. Panov instead of Pandev), Serbia (e.g. Bustan instead of Basta), Wales (e.g. Preece instead of Price), Iceland (Gossenjohn instead of Eidur Gudjohnsen), I'm sure there are a few more teams too. It's not a big deal because you can manually edit them (takes ages as when you edit one player from say Wales it bumps you back to your squad (say Ireland) and you then have to scroll back through to Wales). Also Mutu is wrong again. The trouble is none of these players look that like their real life counterparts and there are no call commentary names. I dont know why they couldnt include these in some form given players like Pandev, Hleb, Stankovic etc were in FIFA 08. It just means that if you are playing say Wales v Slovakia or Holland v Belarus the game feels a bit flat as none of the players have call names.
And the Dutch team is totally messed up with names having no resemblance to any proper players.
These teams above all have fake kits too, as well as teams with proper names like Slovakia, Russia and some others having fake kits. As others have noted Portugals kits are all out of date, Croatia's away is out of date (despite the NEW kit being worn in Nov 07 vs England), Turkey is out of date too, possibly Belgium too.
Like I say it's a superb engine, a game that could have been great, but with such a lack of teams (no non European ones like Argentina Japan etc for friendlies) and licence issues (from what I recall these were not present in World Cup 2006) and dodgy out of date kits, it feels a bit cheap. You could have a Serbia v Holland final in Euro 2008 and fake names and fake kits, it would be like a good version of World Tour Soccer. Even in the intro you see teams like Holland, Portugal, Russia etc lifting the trophy with fake / old kits... it's pretty poor from an EA Sports game. To be honest even if they had included a simple in game kit editor they could have solved most of the kit problems.
Some people might not be at all bothered by this, but IMO £35 is too much to charge for a game with around 50 teams of which at least 15 are incomplete / in accurate.
I hope EA releases a patch with up to date kits for licenced teams like Portugal, Turkey, Croatia etc.
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