FIFA 17 was, by many accounts (including ours), a huge step forward for that series. Not just did it introduce a brand new story mode, The Journey, but it was also the very first game in the series to utilize the Frostbite Engine. However, the biggest change was to the gameplay, which saw a huge buff when it comes to physicality, ball handling, and overall precision and options.
Fortunately, FIFA 18 maintains all the revolutionary additions to the series which were introduced in FIFA 17, together with a continuation of Alex Hunter's Journey. Unfortunately, considering that this is an annual series, its not all edition can easily see as big a noticable difference as last year's iteration, and FIFA 18 suffers a bit in contrast.
I will say this immediately: if you're a soccer fan and for some reason you skipped last year's FIFA, the 2010 game is really worth obtaining. Heck, you don't even need to be a soccer fan to enjoy FIFA 18-it's a good, fun game for anyone, really. Smaller tweaks, like improved ball-handler animations (which will make timing passes, skill moves, and tackles that much more realistic) and quicker gameplay, put the 2010 FIFA above last year's. Adding Squad Battles to Ultimate Team-in which you'll take your squads up against another player's squad inside a single-player match to put around the leaderboards, kind of like trainer battles in Pokemon Go-give players who'd rather compete against a CPU opponent something to complete along with a way to get involved online. More interactive crowds and all-in-all improved lighting means the stadiums are as immersive as always. These improvements, while small on an individual level, certainly means this year's FIFA plays better than last year's.
Unfortunately, this is where the improvements seem to end. It isn't like anything has got worse over this past year, but you'd think, with such a powerful gameplay foundation from this past year, that the team at EA Sports might have taken more to smooth out the wrinkles, but you may still find so many weird, tiny miscalculations within the player animations and even in the announcer dialogue that, maybe because the rest is so good, small things really stick out.
Take, for example, the goalkeeper animations, which are laughably stilted and unnatural sometimes. This is particularly apparent in instant replays of amazing saves, where you get a close-up, slow-motion see the goalkeeper's angular elbows and almost instantaneous leap for that ball. Some more frames of animation would have really helped in those cases, but for as good as the animation looks in the faraway default camera setting once the game is running at normal speed, it looks way worse when you are getting in close and reduce the action. Exactly the same can be said for players taking shots, for that matter.
Another of the kind of weird, unnatural instances occur during goal celebrations. Most of the time, you can interpret exactly what the developers and animators opting for, however it often looks more like uncanny digital puppets not quite reaching far enough to pat the goal-scorer on the back. The sporadic player clipping through another player doesn't help in these instances, either.
Then there are the announcers, Martin Tyler and Alan Smith, whose delivery is phenomenal, but whose scripting needs a little effort. They do not repeat themselves as frequently in the other modes, but while playing through “The Journey,” I must often hear them deliver the same lines dozens and dozens of times. This is also true when the protagonist, Alex Hunter, changes to a particular club (I'll try not to ruin anything here), and Tyler and Smith must have mentioned a celebrity player from that club at the outset of nearly every match. Another small, but equally annoying oversight, is that periodically during matches Hunter is known as to the sideline by his coach. Here, the player is briefed on the game's goals (i.e. mini-objectives that will help your approval rating with the team), but every time Hunter was called over, Tyler insisted he was being subbed from the game, which was clearly incorrect.
These sort of small details mostly stick out since the rest of the presentation is really spot-on. Like our reviewer this past year, I found myself watching many of the opening scenes and replays, even when I was the main one letting up an objective. The presentation is top-notch, but this results in the small mistakes being bold like a pimple on the Mona Lisa.
Likewise, while “The Journey: Hunter Returns” is really as solid as last year's campaign, with some incremental improvements and additions, I feel like they might did more than just send Alex to more clubs than this past year. Following Alex Hunter's storied debut on the pitch, the question on everyone's mind, including Alex's, is if he has got enough talent to become greater than a one-hit wonder. While it doesn't alllow for as compelling a story as last year's Journey, it is more dramatic, as the stakes for Alex are greater than ever since he has something to get rid of.
The best part about last year's story is that it made you want to excel as Alex on the pitch since you wanted to see his success from the pitch, and this year's iteration isn't any different. I felt responsible for Alex's successes, and also the rare occasions when I was given a story-altering decision to make during a cutscene, those decisions carried extra weight because I'd worked so hard (as Alex) to get to that time there am much to lose.
There are a few truly compelling moments in this year's “Journey,” especially one decision you need to make in early stages, not to mention a surprisingly touching storyline involving Alex's family. However the drama, especially later within the story, seems to peter in favor of finding out how many cups your teams can win. There's a couple of incidental detours that will put you in another character's soccer cleats (or football boots, as the Europeans might say), and while these moments are infused with drama, they do not necessarily carry the load of all of the some time and history you've spent with Alex up to that point.
Then, near the end from the story, you're given a strike partner and, together with them, a brand new rating to worry about. Whereas I played most of the story as the entire team, this last bit virtually forced me to experience as only Alex to ensure that I possibly could set up plays effectively enough to attain an optimum partner rating. It is because, whenever I had been manipulating the entire team, it seemed like either Alex or my strike partner would forget ways to get capable of create plays, causing me to give up possession way too actually because I had been forcing plays that just weren't employed by the sake of having an assist on the goal with my strike partner. After i switched to playing as just Alex, however, I was able to navigate the pitch off-ball and obtain into good striking positions before with a pass. It wasn't my preferred way to play, but it appeared like the only method to make anything happen as i was preoccupied with another arbitrary rating system.
Once I believed out working with my strike partner, the gameplay was satisfying, however the whole saga from the strike partner, where your club insists upon choose whom you want to play for after which determines your fate depending on how you play together, would be interesting as a B-plot in Alex's overall story. However, this ends up to be the main narrative force throughout the last area of the game, replacing the compelling personal decisions that you are making for Alex in the story's earlier chapters with terse, poorly acted scenes between Alex and one of three professional soccer players. While actors might be able to pretend to be soccer players, soccer players are terrible at pretending to become actors, and due to this, the drama between Alex along with a strike partner who aren't completely connecting seems forced.
Again, this really is another demonstration of parts of FIFA 18 being so great that the parts of it that aren't so good truly stand out. Our prime quality early parts of Alex's story were what drove me towards the ending, which was much more anticlimactic than last year but still serves to setup “The Journey: Part III: Hunter Returns Again.” Even though you're going to get a respectable amount of gameplay in the story mode, maybe a lot more than most non-sports sim games-it took me around 15 hours to complete-by the end of it, I was definitely prepared to move on from Alex Hunter.
Luckily, there's still plenty to do when you complete “The Journey.” Career modes as both individual players and club managers remain, as is online play. FIFA Ultimate Team has plenty of features for single- and multiplayer matches, with a whole slew of objectives to accomplish. Then, obviously, there's standard online multiplayer.
One thing that I immediately noticed about standard, non-Ultimate Team online multiplayer was that, if you wish to play as any club apart from Real Madrid, PSG, or Arsenal, you're virtually screwed. There's an choice to restrict your matchmaking to players who are playing as similarly rated clubs, but you will have a more difficult time finding a match with these settings activated. This means that Columbus Crew fans will be at a complete loss, unless you wish to go up against a much, much higher-rated FC Barcelona. That could change as more players come online, but for now no longer playing as a lower-ranked but personal favorite, unless you would like to get absolutely crushed.
After you decide on your team from the number of five-star teams in the game, finding a match doesn't take very long, however when you're actually playing, the frame-rate may become so choppy sometimes it's nearly impossible to experience. This is frustrating for any sports game, but it is especially frustrating with a game like FIFA 18, where precision is everything. Of course, this could easily change, as while penning this review, there have been only 2,000 or so players online. I imagine that, once the game is fully released, you will see a lot more, having a much better choice of players with higher connections for the servers to select. There's enough to complete in your own-what with the story mode, the career modes, and FIFA Ultimate Team-that people who want to altogether avoid online multiplayer can do so, however for those looking to match their skills against other players, expect a few hiccups in the game's connection here and there.
This does, however, reflect the possible lack of polish that went into FIFA 18 also it further evidences that, if FIFA 17 was a labor of affection, FIFA 18 feels like a far more expected form of an entry in an annual sports series-still good, but a lot of same.
