The Player Career, meanwhile – a key point of emphasis last year – has added in a salary system, and personality points which can help you better refine what type of player you want to be. It’s good, albeit still far too user interface heavy, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Career mode largely takes on the same form, albeit there are new cutscenes to add flavour, context, and atmosphere to key moments. What about single player, then? Well, there’s not so much to speak of here, really. Patches will almost certainly help (please give Darwin Nunez a proper face), but EA Sports must set new standards in next year's game. Ultimately, I've been enjoying Career Mode this year – and FIFA 23 as a whole – but there's still so much room for improvement. Well, outside of the new power shots, which seem to remove goalkeepers from the equation entirely – but that's a minor gripe in the overall picture. What's more, the AI is no longer so susceptible to being bulldozed after conceding – a real issue back in FIFA 22, which meant that you could rack up crazy 9-0 wins on a regular basis. The slower pace helps keep most scorelines within the realms of reality. But even though they can quickly grow repetitive, the new cinematics add some flavour to proceedings, and the gameplay adjustments on the pitch make for a more realistic career experience – which, for me, is the biggest positive. The overhauled user interface is clumsy – why do you have to navigate through an additional menu just to see the league's top scorers? – and a lot of the admin stuff is unfortunately quite buggy (at least at launch). Second OpinionĬareer Mode has always been my jam in FIFA, and this year's offering somehow feels like both a step forward and a step back. It’s true that competent players with weaker teams can overcome rich kids with God squads, but with elements of pay-to-win at play here, it belittles the competitive aspect of the entire experience. While it’s possible to earn plenty of packs through gameplay, the odds are always rigged in EA Sports’ favour: pull an 83+ player and you can guarantee you’re getting a random goalkeeper from the Eredivisie and not Kylian Mbappe – that’s just how the game’s designed. While rivals like NBA 2K23 allow you to assemble a reasonable team with little to no investment, the reality is that even competing on the lower rungs of the FUT Champions ladder is going to require you to cough up, because barely above average players cost an absolute fortune on the Transfer Market. But where in games like Madden NFL 23 you’re able to tackle an entire set, back-to-back, FIFA 23 wants to take you through several screens of menus before getting you to the next objective – it all feels a bit disjointed and cumbersome.Īnd of course, old habits die hard: this is still by far the most costly sports game on the market when it comes to microtransactions. In an effort to augment more single player content, the FIFA Mobile-inspired FUT Moments seem like a ridiculously smart addition: bitesized gameplay challenges that you can complete with your team in return for tradable stars. This, of course, expands to the Squad Building Challenges, which are popular team-building exercises you can complete for rewards – it’s just not as engaging as it once was. While we can appreciate this is easier for newcomers to understand, and actually allows for fresh team-building possibilities, the flexibility takes away a lot of the reward from finding the perfect piece for a particular puzzle. Personally, we’re not particularly big fans. All this leads to a more deliberate, physical game of football that better replicates the real thing – with perhaps the exception of the arcade-esque Power Shots, which have an exaggerated wind-up time but are deadly when aimed correctly. Tackling has also been buffed, meaning it’s now possible – albeit risky, as you’d expect – to slide in and poke the ball away from five-star attackers. Much to the malign of bigmouthed YouTubers with even bigger followings, the gameplay is a lot slower, with a greater emphasis on passing the ball between players rather than running rings around defenders using Lionel Messi.
Fans of EA Sports’ flagship football franchise will be familiar with the formula: this is more refinement than revolution, but FIFA 22 threaded through some of the best virtual soccer we’ve seen from the juggernaut publisher in several years, and the latest instalment iterates on that without ripping up the tactics sheet.
After an incredible 30-year run, FIFA 23 had to go out on a high – and to be fair, we reckon it just about has.
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