FIFA 07

Author: Ryan Garside
Published: 16th October 2006
Comments (8) Stumble

Trickery

This is emphasised by moments in the FIFA game which you have probably never come across in a football sim before. The glaring omission in most games has been the absence of handball – that has now changed with the new FIFA, and handballs are now a punishable offence.

Not that you really should be getting tackled anyway, with the wealth of trickery options available to you. One area that always seemed lacking in the Pro Evo series was the ability to mimic the tricks you see players like Ronaldhino perform on a weekly basis. In FIFA 07 it is possible to perform a wide variety of tricks from the simple lane change, where you swiftly sidestep an opponent, to the jazzy looking flick over your own head.

Be warned though, these tricks are difficult to perform with any substantial benefit and I found that they mostly tended to finish with me losing the ball.



FIFA 07 Gameplay Continued FIFA 07 Gameplay Continued
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I mentioned before handball situations. FIFA improves on previous attempts to get a balance whereby the computer commits realistic fouls. Every now and again the computer will try to hack you down and will sometimes mis-judge a tackle completely, leaving you with a penalty. This seems a like a necessary, rudimentary feature for a game but belive me, only a few years ago football games were especially lacking in this area. On the other hand ,offsides are almost non-existent in the game (a far cry from FIFA 06, where they happened almost every attack), strikers rarely make a 'bad' run and despite making the game flow better it also makes the game seem less realistic.

For all the positive aspects of the new FIFA game there are still quite a few niggles. At times the goalkeepers are abysmal. Petr Cech, the brilliant shot-stopper for Chelsea, quite often made bloopers that Paul Robinson would be ashamed of. I could perhaps believe this if it was a rare occurrence, a freak incident. Unfortunately, it appears to be the standard pactice of the FIFA goalkeepers to sometimes just let the strikers score. I suspect there may be bungs involved.

FIFA 07 Gameplay Continued FIFA 07 Gameplay Continued
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This is one of the contributing factors to another niggle I have with the game - too many matches end up high scoring affairs. This is most probably due to the difficulty with defending, which at times is an absolute nightmare. Trying to select the right defender as your opponent steams forward is more luck than skill. On occasion the opposition will be able to walk straight into your box unopposed as you desperately try to select your centre back whilst instead switching from your right back to your midfield.

I would probably be happy to let that go if the attacking portion of the game was seamless. This, once again, falls short of Pro Evo standards. Shooting feels very 'lucky-dip', at times working fine with shots firing in straight and true, then at other times feeling like the computer makes your shots fire over on purpose to provide some aspect of randomness. At least the game isn't plagued with the all too common FIFA ailment of 'scoring-hotspots' where certain areas of the pitch always end up with a goal if the shoot button is pressed.

So, FIFA 07 is a huge improvement on previous FIFA offerings but is still a yard off the pace when compared to Pro Evo. The most positive aspect here is EA's willingness to try and change the brand name for the better as for too many years they have rested on their laurels and churned out games that contained nothing new. The integration of a real management component (which we have barely touched on here, but adds some useful depth), the attempts to make the game play better and the effort that has gone into constructing a working multiplayer game are only slightly diminished by the negatives above. In fact the multiplayer portion of the game is a section that requires a page of its own.

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