After years of sitting behind the FIFA name, EA has pulled away from the name and rebranded to EA FC 24 which ends decades of partnership between FIFA themselves and EA.
When news of the partnership ended, many worried that this could be a massive challenge for EA especially for the more casual player.
But with EA FC 24, it shows that EA doesn’t need a name to sell its hit football sim – and that it’s the years of crafting and honing the gameplay, physics engine and adding fun extra like Ultimate Team that still make it the best football game to date.
I’m a massive newbie when it comes to football games – especially EA FC 24 or past FIFA games – which was a fun but also daunting prospect when reviewing the game but after the hours of playing and trying to understand why or how it has the massive fanbase it does, I can see why it’s so popular
EA has managed to make a game that does the most important thing of all – making football extremely fun – and EA FC 24 isn’t any different.
I started off by trying to learn the basics and EA FC 24 does that fairly well thanks to a fairly robust training and drill system on the game which really took me by surprise and there I was able to learn the basics of passing, dribbling, shooting but also other advanced techniques.
By the end of the training, it felt a bit overwhelming but I could see it all coming together – albeit very slowly.
Playing a match in EA FC 24 – whether it’s against a friend or the AI – is ridiculously fun (even when you’re being beaten 5-1). All the elements of the game whether that’s passing, tackling, shielding or dribbling work very well with the occasional frustrating quirk with passes veering off target or AI not tracking runs well.
Animations would also bug out occasionaly. The funniest of these was after a tackle which stopped the game, the game panned to my manager whose head seems to have collapses on half his face or a player’s arm that would look very unnatural.
One of the biggest complaints I hear every year about EA’s football releases is how it rarely changes but when you have a game that plays this well and is this fun, you can understand why only subtle changes are made.
Everything feels natural and fluid when you’re on the pitch and that might be thanks to the new HyperMotion V that EA has implemented this year.
Jumping into Player and Manager Career was also daunting task but each mode felt like a breath of fresh air after coming from my rigurous training schedule on how to play the game.
One thing that EA FC 24 does well is by explaining to games to completely new players like myself and I never struggled to know what was going on. Manager mode had me hooked and allowed me to craft everything I wanted when it came to my squad.
Things like the Total Management System and the Tactical System really felt like I could be as granual as I wanted when it came to my team and I had hours of time trying to craft my squad.
Player Career was also a heap of fun, trying to get myself to go for my target team at the end of the season and the new PlayStyles allowed me to craft my player into someone I could imagine being on the pitch (if I was any good at the game).
Ultimate Team is the big elephant in the room when it comes to EA FC 24. The microtransaction trading card mode allows you to build your team by opening packs and then craft your team with the players you want and introduces aspects like chemistry and stats to go against AI or other online players to prove who has the best team.
This year there’s a new system called Evolutions which allows you to upgrade your team with certain stats thanks to gameplay challenges. It pulls away from the microtransaction bloat slightly but it still doesn’t affect your player enough compared to someone who has spent more money on opening packs and packs of cards.
Ultimate Team is fun if you enjoying blowing your money on opening packs and for those who do spend their moeny, they are rewarded with potentially better players and a better experience on Ultimate Team. You can grind time and hours and earn points to spend opening packs but sometimes you wonder whether or not it’s worth it when you can just open your wallet which is depressing.
Despite the microtransactions hitting me in the face, Ultimate Team is a very fun mode if you enjoy the thrill of crafting your own team of superstars with your own name, kit and stadium. Personally it’s not my cup of tea.
EA FC 24 has shown why other companies can’t knock them off the pedistal when it comes to football sims. EA FC 24 and previous FIFA games before it have slowly and carefully perfected their craft and produced a series that is extremely fun and engaging to play with friends, family, online players and even the AI itself.
For the newbies like myself, it teaches you everything that you need to know at a base level but also has that feeling of a game that is easy to learn but hard to master. A game you can either dedicate yourself to or casually play if you want to feel the adrenaline of scoring a goal.
Losing the FIFA franchise hasn’t seemed to affect it in the slightest and I can predict that we’ll all probably forget that it lost its name pretty soon because what really matters is creating a fun, expansive gameplay experience for people to enjoy.
And EA has nailed it with EA FC 24.
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