IGN
With 500-plus teams and interactive online leagues, EA puts its best foot forward with its upcoming soccer title.
by Jonathan Miller
August 7, 2006 - Soccer junkies have fallen on hard times. After one of the greatest FIFA World Cups in, well, maybe ever, we've all come down pretty hard from that glorious high, and we're all itching for new soccer titles like Floyd Landis for a fresh testosterone patch.
So bang, in steps Electronic Arts with FIFA 07, a title with 520 teams and more licenses than every other EA Sports title combined. I'm pretty sure my Under-16 youth soccer team from 1994 is in the lineup for FIFA 07. At the EA Studio Showcase last month, we played a few games of current-gen FIFA, but were sworn to secrecy until today. In the meantime, EA could break the news to those real football hooligans -- and the primary FIFA audience -- in the European market. While we wait in anticipation for the inevitable release of a full fledged, next-gen FIFA title, we have our impressions of quite possibly the final current-gen iteration of the FIFA franchise. (We learned today that NBA Street Vol 3 will only appear on PS3 and 360, so we'll see. Also, check out the footer of EA's FIFA 07 site and guess for yourself if a 360 version is in the works.)
At the show, FIFA producer Joe Booth made sure we only played with Liverpool and Bayern Munich, mostly because he was afraid AS Roma would break the game with an obscene amount of goals off the foot of Totti. You can check out 100 percent gameplay footage here of Schweinsteiger and company.
The first thing to notice about FIFA 07 is that EA is continuing to travel down the path that Winning Eleven took, straying farther away from the arcade play of FIFA 2001 and closer to the organic, pass-pass-pass gameplay of Konami's outstanding football franchise. 2006 FIFA World Cup was a fine example of a step in the right gameplay direction, although there were still a few exploitable moves, like the through-ball.
This time around, Booth and his team added back spin and top spin to the improved ball physics. When receiving passes, you'll notice little of the magnetic ball that has plagued soccer games in the past, and the ball will take plenty of interesting bounces. Midfield play has taken on greater importance as you now have to jostle more and more for deep passes from goal kicks, for example. A few times we fought our way around an opponent to get a head on the ball, although a few times we overran the pass and the opponent moved forward uncontested.
Shooting has been tweaked. The basic shot mechanic is still in place, but you can also press a "skill shot" button to try and bend one in or apply the aforementioned top and back spin, but we didn't have much luck with it. Then again, we only had about 20 minutes of gameplay time, but we like the potential of the skill shot, especially after seeing some of the ridiculous moves pulled off in the Cup. Soccer games need some more advanced moves to catch up with real life, moves that are more than just canned animations, and we'll see if the skill shot can pull it off.
Visually, FIFA 07 is not much of an improvement over 06, something we've seen recently with other EA Sports titles, most likely because development teams are spread thin with next-gen titles as well. That's not to say that FIFA 07 looks bad -- it just looks like a mild improvement over 06.
A big upgrade has been made in the sound department, especially with the crowds. Fans are loud, really loud, losing their collective minds over turnovers at midfield and breakaways runs. We're still hoping for all-out hooliganism and road-flare-based minigames, but this attention to the crowds still warrants approval.
We do know that EA is planning on a new online feature called Interactive Leagues. Don't get too excited just yet, 2K Sports fans. From what we know so far, these leagues are not the same sign-up-with-your-friends-and-jam kind of leagues. Instead, EA is giving you the option to select a favorite team from the English Premiership, Bundesliga, France's LFP or Mexican First Division. Let's say you choose Arsenal. When Arsenal plays Manchester United in real life, you and every other Arsenal fan will play every Manchester United fan in an online battle. EA will keep track of the winners and the team that scores more victories is declared the winner. Yeah, it's not the online league we were hoping for, but this feature adds more to the community of soccer fans than we've seen in a long time. Unfortunately, only those four leagues will be included as MLS and Italy's Serie A have been left off the list, among others. EA says this is because the countries left off the list don't have a significant amount of online players, and MLS just doesn't have a huge fan base. We're bummed because Lazio fans were going to take a serious beating in an online Derby, but it looks like we'll have to wait until next year, if EA continues the feature.
One thing that will continue is our coverage of FIFA 07. We'll have more on FIFA 07 soon, along with new details on the manager mode and online play.
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