FIFA 17

An OK game. As usual, plagued with little gameplay bugs, the worst being the "change player" button that either doesn't work in critical moments, or keeps giving you the wrong player (the R3 stick doesn't work properly too).

I dream of a world where EA Sports wouldn't rush a new broken FIFA each year, and would instead take their time to craft a fully working game every 3-4 years or so (and sell updates for complete rosters each season to still get their money with very little effort)

You'd think that the very first thing a sports simulation - or at least one that strives for realism as obviously and openly as the FIFA series does - should do is get the laws of the game right, wouldn't you? And yet the very first thing you'll notice about FIFA 17, at least if you watch football, is that they've still got two players stood in the centre-circle for kick-off. That feels like a pretty major oversight, when this change to the laws was announced way back in January, came into effect on June 1st, and was demonstrated at a major international tournament this summer. That wasn't the only rule change introduced, and the others have been ignored in this game too - and while you can appreciate that the rules on grappling in the area at corners would be pretty hard to code into this game, the 'triple jeopardy' punishment of a red card, suspension, and penalty for last-man fouls in the area is still there and isn't quite so forgivable.

The impression I get from playing through a lot more of the game is that timing really conspired against FIFA 17, in a multitude of ways. This has been billed as the biggest overhaul to the series in years, with the introduction of a single player mode named The Journey (presumably inspired by Spike Lee 's contributions to NBA 2K16's MyCareer mode, but much more reminiscent of the story in Tony Hawk's Underground from where I'm standing) and the move from the Ignite engine to Frostbite. The latter of those two at least, iof not both, would probably have been planned years ago, and the drive to get them in place meant that a lot of other things were overlooked. Like the rules. And like the gameplay.

FIFA 17's gameplay feels like a major step down from FIFA 16, its natural fluidity replaced with awkward frustration, its quirks now feeling like they actively punish people who understand football, its players now feeling less like representations of professional footballers and more like blundering idiots, controlling them less like realizing their potential and more like an escort mission. On more than one occasion - several occasions, in fact - I found myself quietly muttering abuse at my own players ('nobody's first touch is that bad!' being a particular favourite, with 'make a fucking run!' a close second) and wondering exactly why the designers of this game had suddenly decided that literally every single aspect of a player's behavior should come down to me. That's never been the case before in this series, but now, a player won't even trap the ball, let alone shield it from an oncoming defender, unless you give them specific instructions to do so - depending on how you react to that, it either has the impact of making the game's controls outrageously complicated or making it far easier to score goals from outside the box than inside it. It also has the impact of making playing online, against other people who are fighting against the controls and watching their players do stupid things repeatedly, much easier than playing against the CPU, even on Semi-Pro difficulty. (For the uninitiated, there are three difficulty settings higher than this, and FIFA 16 was notorious for having a huge jump in difficulty between the fairly relaxing, almost too-easy Professional and the punishing World Class a step above it - and you can't even really praise them for closing the gap between the two levels, because it's just opened a new, even bigger one between Semi-Pro and the still insultingly easy Amateur.)

At times, it honestly feels like it was barely tested. Surely a decent QE team would have noticed that watching a bullish striker like Diego Costa get so easily ragdolled in the area by the wispish Danny Rose, a defender almost 8 inches shorter than him, looks fundamentally ridiculous. Surely they would have remembered that obstruction is an actual law that exists in football (you'd be forgiven for thinking that the rule prohibiting it had been abolished, based on how often and how brazenly the CPU does it to you here). Surely they'd have argued that a player with a dribbling stat above 90 shouldn't slow down to almost half their normal running pace when they have the ball. Surely they'd have pointed out that regularly watching your player pass the ball in a completely different direction to the one you're pointing at is a bit of a problem. Surely they'd have had an objection with the way all the AI players on your team immediately run away in blind panic every time there's a loose ball like it's a fucking IED, or with the way the AI players not on your team somehow don't suffer from this same chronic, crippling phobia of round objects. Surely they'd have criticized the hyperactive player switching, which frequently results in you trying to make a tackle with a defensive midfielder, being automatically switched to a central defender, tackling thin air (even though you pressed the tackle button before the switch), and being left completely out of position as the player you would have otherwise easily stopped waltzes straight down the red carpet you've effectively laid out for him and scores. Hey, they might even have spotted that a full-back given instructions to overlap should probably occasionally....y'know, overlap, or that a striker that you've explicitly told only to make runs to the far post might want to stop constantly making them to the near post and dragging all the defenders towards you as he does it. They will probably - hopefully - fix all this with patches (they'd have to be some pretty hefty patches, mind), but for a game that has as much exposure as this one does, it's kind of incredible that so many basic gameplay mistakes slipped through the net into the final product. It's not hard to draw the conclusion that EA Vancouver really struggled with Frostbite and underestimated just how big a job it was to port their work into it.

And yet, The Journey exists.

The Journey is both FIFA 17's calling card and its saving grace. There was a lot of skepticism (although not necessarily amongst FIFA players) when it was announced that there would be a story mode where you took a promising youngster and navigated the minefield of a professional football career, but it really, really works, and adds a huge amount to the series. The story doesn't delve into some of the areas I'd have liked it to - it only hints at the kind of problems players can have with their agents, and doesn't even let you choose who your agent is at first (one wonders how this might have panned out if, say, Saido Berahino was hired as an 'authenticity consultant' rather than Reece Oxford, whose name looks just a little out of place next to established internationals like Harry Kane, Marco Reus, and Eden Hazard on the list of said consultants) - but it does drive itself into some very unexpected areas instead, like childhood abandonment. That's not even a joke; one of the first things you see is Alex Hunter's parents have a fight and break up on the touchline of one of his youth games, and Hunter's desire to have a normal relationship with his absentee father returns again and again. It's not exactly Papo & Yo, granted, but it's a world away from anything you'd expect from a football game. The gameplay in this mode is vastly improved on other modes, too, partly because the camera angle used makes escaping defenders in tight spaces much more intuitive, and partly because, as you're only controlling one player, any frustration about the passing is nullified. There's a weird thrill that comes from seeing some of the players appear too, particularly one early scene with Marco Reus in a pre-season friendly. There is obviously potential to do more with this mode - it's disappointing, for instance, that you can't start in the Bundesliga or Serie A rather than in England, and when you're playing as a side in the bottom half of the Premier League, one of the transfers that acts as a key plot device is deeply unrealistic enough to be laughable - but as an initial outing it's very, very strong.

It really does save this game from full-on disappointment, with everything else added to the game either ultimately irrelevant (seeing the managers on the touchline is a nice touch, but it's not exactly a huge deal either way) or a disaster (the penalties. Jesus tap dancing Christ, the penalties.), and everything retained from the last game either kept on a par compared to FIFA 16 (like Ultimate Team, which is still great fun as a concept even though it's now only enjoyable to play it online), or made worse (the collision detection). I am, at least, confident that all the problems with this game ultimately stem from the engine change, and the next version will come back out swinging, but for now FIFA 17, while salvageable with some adjustments and still great fun to play against other people, feels like a huge disappointment salvaged only by the one thing you would have expected to disappoint.