Any FIFA player will know that slight changes have huge effects and any fan will eye tweaks to the game with equal excitement and suspicion. One wrong move can make the year a dud. Regular players of FIFA will also know that the immediate knee-jerk reaction to a change in gameplay is normally to exclaim that the game feels worse. FIFA 14 is no different. EA has injected more than a small dose of realism into FIFA 14, and it's all about physics. Your players movement and balance is much more sensitive and it has dramatic effects on their ability on the ball. You can see players adjusting their step – the feature in FIFA 14 dubbed Precision Movement in action – and looks great as strikers line up their shots, or midfielders skip into the box.
Likewise, the career sees only minor changes. It's still split between player and manager – both options let you control the entire team, but the former can use their virtual pro and skip all the management gubbins. It still serves up emails from the board and transfer gossip on the wire to keep you involved (Soldado isn't happy at Spurs. Oh). And it's still meshed together by an agonisingly slow calendar system that ticks through each day like the life cycle of a star. Transfers have at least had a facelift, though.
Along with more hurdles to jump for a signature in FIFA 14, such as promising players match time and checking they're nice and marginalised at their current squad before prowling, there's a new global scouting network. Here you'll employ up to six scouts of varying knowhow, set parameters, and send them off. You can find and nurture an unknown prodigy in the youth team or get beads on established names, learning cost and wage demands so you can make a bid that won't be laughingly dismissed. As a result, wheeling, dealing, and finally securing that hot prospect is much more rewarding.
Jostling has better balance, too. There are fewer over-exaggerated pushes off the ball; players engage in a prolonged to-and-fro in battles for possession, taking pace and momentum into account. The ability to ride sliding tackles means that challenges must be near-perfect to win possession. All in all, this is an improved version of what's gone before. The new lick of paint is nice, but it’s the changes under the hood that make the significant difference.
But there are so many ways that the experience might have been improved or expanded on, that it's hard not to feel like the series is trapped passing the ball around in its own half. Problems from the old games return, from the hilariously bad commentary – worse even than real football – to goalkeeper snafus, bad pass assistance, and other frustrations. Given that next-gen consoles are getting a new engine with more advanced physics, it's all the more disappointing that our version feels like FIFA 13.5. For me, the superficial changes are more compelling than these new systems, which are largely forgotten about after a few hours of adaptation. Shooting is probably where the game has seen the biggest infusion of new fun. Technique remains largely unchanged, but the range of contextual shot types is much greater, from dipping volleys to outside-of-the-boot shots with a succulent reverse-swerve. I lost hours in the practice area using Ibrahimovic to bend the ball out-to-in from miles outside the box. It always looks amazing.
Most will, of course, be investing a large portion of match time in the online realms where you once again run the risk of more Barcelona and Real Madrid beatings. We jumped onto Xbox Live to test online matches and clearly there are still some issues to sort out. Before we could even get our online season session up and running, there were error messages telling us that ‘squad file does not match that of your opponent’ and requests to delete online squad files. By resetting to default squads we were finally able to play online and it was normal service resumed with nothing out of the ordinary to report.
