After an extended period of leave EA have decided to bring FIFA Street out of retirement with the hope of breathing fresh life into an ailing franchise. The old FIFA Street games were outlandish cloying logic-free time-siphons whilst this new edition holds a pretence to being something more. It runs on the same game engine as FIFA 12 and its line director Sid Misra promises ‘the first true quality street football experience’.
What they seem to be satying is this: FIFA Street has grown up and attempted to add some realism to what was previously a rather neon-speckled cartoon of a game. But does it solve the problems that plagued the old editions of the game?
FIFA Street has always adopted a somewhat over-simplified approach. The control set-up is identical to that found within the main FIFA title, with a couple of important exceptions. The left stick allows you to effortless pull off a whole range of tricks from feints to step-overs and as you level up your player you’ll gain access to increasingly impressive manoeuvres.
Tapping R1 allows you to play keepy-uppy with the ball and toy with the opponent whenever he comes near, by effortlessly flicking it over your shoulder. It’s all very easy to pull off and whilst this allows for a certain amount of ‘pick-up and play’ value, it also takes some of the reward out of the tricks themselves.
That’s not to say that beating the game on Hard is a breeze, it’s simply that it’s all too easy to pull off the kind of tricks that real footballers spend years perfecting. It really shouldn’t be as easy as a flick of your thumb. Despite embracing realism, FIFA Street plays very much like an arcade game.
There are certainly enough game modes to keep you coming back. Of course there’s the option for five-a-side but there are also three-on-three games, Futsal games, Panna matches and Last Man Standing. In Last Man Standing you lose a player whenever the opposition scores a goal. During Panna matches you earn points for tricks which are then ‘banked’ by scoring a goal or lost when the opponent scores. Futsal games feature wider goalmouths, no walls and a bigger pitch.
There’s enough variety here to keep you coming back for more, and the ‘World Tour’ mode is entertaining enough to motivate you to want to proceed.
But there are some major problems with this game. The passing system can be very unintuitive (you’re not allowed to select who you’re passing to) and this tilts the focus almost exclusively to using one player to dance around the opposition before slotting home.
Then there’s defending. Though FIFA Street has adopted FIFA 12’s tactical defending system, it doesn’t really seem to have been fine tuned to adequately deal with the trick-mechanics embedded here. You can put in a challenge, get a foot to the ball and then fall over and lose possession. However innovative the collision detection system is in this game, it can lead to an awful amount of blocking, tripping over nothing and breaking up of play.
Despite these criticisms, there’s not getting round the fact that FIFA Street is a lot of fun to play despite its flaws. None of the issues are particularly game-breaking and there’s a lot of excitement to be had from pulling off a chain of impressive tricks and rifling home an unstoppable shot. In short, FIFA have managed to revive the franchise, not by embracing realism, but by sticking to what made the series entertaining in the first place.
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