FIFA 11 Review

Posted Wed 19th Jan 2011 4:41pm by Gavin Lowe

In 10 seconds

FIFA 11 is the latest entry in the world’s premier football video game franchise. Though insanely detailed, there are a few disappointing omissions.

Background

EA churns out a FIFA title every year, usually timed to coincide with the start of the European football season. Last year’s FIFA 10 was widely praised as the pinnacle of football video games. FIFA 11 doesn’t make the giant leap forward in gameplay, features, and visuals that its predecessor did, but it does have enough by way of updates, tweaks, and AI to warrant spending your hard earned cash. You can expect a polished game with a variety of game modes, online and offline gameplay, and every team in every major league in the world.

Gameplay

Players can take charge of a team and guide them to cup or league glory, set up exhibition matches with the greatest teams in the world (or the worst), and create their own pro and pit them against the best. A substantial amount of time can be spent customising every aspect of your pro, from looks, height, weight, and hairstyle to playing style, commentary name, and goal celebrations.

Frustratingly, when playing as a pro you only get to play through a match if your player has been selected for the team. If you aren’t playing as a manager, your selection to the team is down to the computer. Initially, your player is low-skilled (your XP increases as you play), and it is rare to be selected to play regularly for one of the top teams. If you want your player to be involved regularly, you have to start out in one of the lower league teams. This is fine if the team you support is down there anyway, but frustrating if your preferred team is in the Premiership.

Playing as a goalkeeper is a whole new spin for the FIFA series - one I found quite boring. Playing as the keeper consists of watching most of the action up-field for a large portion of the game with short sharp bursts of activity around your goalmouth, usually resulting in fumbling the ball and the opponents scoring. For me, FIFA was always about the excellent outfield play. Waiting around in the 18-yard box just doesn’t do it, but if that’s your bent then the option is there.

The action continues in multiplayer, where players can take control of a team or get involved in full-on 11 vs. 11 player matches where every player must stay in their correct positions and work together to win. Unfortunately, I have yet to play this mode when you don’t see your goalkeeper sprinting to the other end of the pitch hunting for individual glory, or wingers slide tackling their own strikers to get the ball so they can shoot instead. The whole experience feels like herding cats.

By far the greatest addition to the gameplay in FIFA 11 is Personality Plus. With Personality Plus, players you know and love act, run, shoot, celebrate, and react just like you would expect to see them to in real life. It’s simply superb. Granted some of the lower league, lesser-known players are quite generic, but your Rooneys, Lampards, Gerrads, Bales, and Crouches all look and act authentically.

The AI hasn’t improved much since FIFA 10, and the off-the-ball players rarely act as aggressively as one would expect. Sometimes they don’t react to developing situations as you would want (missing obvious intercepts etc), but considering the otherwise solid football action, this is just a minor issue.

Visuals

Players look like their real life counterparts, and sport accurate builds, gaits, and movements. Stadiums are closely rendered, although as with many sports titles, the crowd is not convincing. The various weather and environmental conditions are simulated well, with wet conditions slowing and softening the pace of play and hot dry conditions encouraging quick, hard and fast football.

The animations of AI controlled players when off the ball are very convincing, with life-like actions such as slowing from sprints and downhearted turns after a miss adding to the game’s ambience. In-game cut scenes are smoothly integrated in FIFA 11, almost seamlessly flicking between the action camera when in play, to the support camera angles and replays when the ball goes out of play. In almost every way, the experience of playing FIFA 11 is like watching a match on television, but with the obvious sense of control that a video game gives you.

Audio

Often in sports games, the generic rubbish spouted by the commentary team serves only to irritate, but FIFA 11's pundits are able to avoid repetition thanks to the wide variety of comments and the way they are linked and triggered. Crowd chants are cleverly done; most teams have similar songs that ring out from the stands every week and EA have chosen to muffle the crowd to make it appear as if they are singing team-specific chants. The roars and boos are worked in well, as are screams of elation during scores, providing an engrossing atmosphere for football.

Closing comments

FIFA 11 doesn’t break new ground in the same way FIFA 10 did, but its tweaks and improvements, especially Personality Plus, ensure that it stands alone as a title in its own right. The variety of competitions, game modes, teams, and players will ensure FIFA 11 will last a long time. It is enthralling, a must have for football fans, and a good purchase for anyone who can enjoy a good sports game.

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