Women’s football is FIFA 16’s marquee new feature; an addition that realistically should have come a lot sooner – but let’s stick with the positives. It’s here. It’s featured. It’s not half-baked. But it is relegated to the bottom right of the menu, you’ve only got two modes to play (single matches or tournaments) and team selection is national sides only. Somewhat fittingly, women’s football is similar to how men’s football was featured in the original FIFA International Soccer back in 1993. Ah well, baby steps.
So, the important question: how is it actually using the women’s teams? Well, they play football. Some might have expected some differences between the men’s and women’s games, but there really isn’t much – perhaps the female game relies more on pace and trickery than the men’s, while the chaps have a stronger aerial game… but honestly, that could be totally wrong: they’re just very similar. Both feature the new bits – the on-screen prompts of the Trainer, a feature introduced for beginners but one that can teach old hacks new ways of playing; the ‘pass with purpose’ function, a n a wkward b utton c ombo ( R1/RB and pass) that results in playing the ball somewhere between a through ball and a normal ball; no-touch dribbling, which gives players an utterly pointless feature that hardly anyone will use – it’s all there.
Women don’t see most of the other modes, though – you’re not going to be taking part in FIFA 16’s mildly revamped career mode with the women, for example. With the men you can go through this section, of course, and you too can be disappointed that training – where you choose up to five players each week to drill in certain ways, allowing stats to be increased and younger players to develop quicker – all feels thoroughly gimmicky and like a wad more padding in a mode that doesn’t need to waste more of your time. Everything else in career mode – the continuing focus on scouting, the improved array of tournaments and grounds on show and so on – is a good distraction and a fine way to sink single-player time into the game, but it does feel like it doesn’t get the love certain other modes, featured in a boxout on these pages, do.
In all of FIFA 16’s pre-release hype, there wasn’t much talk of the big new features of the game proper. It turns out that’s with good reason: this is a refined game, not one that’s seen much in the way of changes. Even so, the tweaks and smaller changes FIFA 16 has seen on the pitch itself have had a fair bit of impact, and it’s certainly not all been for the better.
Some changes are great, like the tweaks to defending to make it so your back line is able to pull a tackle out in more areas, at more speeds and with more angles. Tactical defending – the feature introduced back in FIFA 12 – is still a mixed bag; ideal for the hardcore professionals who need all the control they can get, but a bit too loose and uncertain for the beginners. The new minor defending tweaks in FIFA 16 make some headway towards fixing this for less skilful players, but honestly a lot of people will still be switching the option back to legacy defending.
Other little changes on the field come in the shape of things like speed being less of a winall stat. It’s something EA acknowledged as being an irritation of previous FIFAs, but the way the studio has ‘fixed’ the power of pace seems to have been… well, to nerf it. Fast players are still fast, and given enough space they will pelt off down the wing away from allcomers, but generally speaking it feels much like FIFA 16 has just slowed down on-the-ball control a little bit, and/or given a little boost of speed to the defending player/s. It feels clumsy as a solution and often leads to frustration, but this is a much lesser evil than the godlike prowess of pacey players in the past.
Crossing has been tweaked, but on the default setting it seems to go to the opposition keeper 75% of the time – switch that to manual in the options and the problem is fixed. Interceptions and blocks have been upgraded, meaning players are now more ‘intelligent’ and able to get in the way more often. This leads to situations – especially against the AI – where very few of your passes over a couple of metres in distance will get to their intended target. Hopefully this will see further balancing tweaks with updates, because right now it’s an off-putting and deeply frustrating element of FIFA 16’s single-player modes.
Beyond that, FIFA 16 doesn’t see any real, notable changes on the pitch. You know what to expect from it, and you really won’t be disappointed with what the game offers. It feels snappier than the last few years of the series has done, and the addition of women’s football – admittedly 22 years after the series began – is a huge step into opening the FIFA series up to a whole new audience for the first time since those first few licensed tracks were included to lure in a more casual audience. But there is a stronger sense of ennui with FIFA 16 than we’ve felt in the last six or seven years: functional changes are minor, tweaks still need some balancing and the whole thing does have a slight stench of staleness to it. It’s still great, but next year we do hope EA concentrates on what’s in the game less, and more about what’s fun to play.