EA Sports FC 24 review – The FIFA that’s not FIFA, but still FIFA

This year, Electronic Arts, EA Sports and FIFA reached a big milestone. Well, not actually the latter. How could it come, since the FIFA game series (because of course that’s what I was thinking about, and not about the all-powerful world organization of football) retired last year. That was it, slush-pass. No more FIFA. At this time last year, we might even have been worried, if we hadn’t already known that he doesn’t eat the goulash soup so hot.

EA already said in advance that it was okay, although they did not manage to shove a big enough piece of paper under the nose of FIFA (and here I mean the all-powerful world organization of football) to fit the many zeros that they wanted to write on the amount column, but this it does not mean that there is no more football game then. If there is no more cooperation between the publisher and the organization, then it is time to paddle into new waters. At least in terms of addressing. That’s when the time came for the big EA brainstorming, where, presumably, after several hours, days, or even weeks of sweaty brainstorming together, the miracle was born: EA Sports FC!

Okay, let’s be honest. This title is bad. But this does not necessarily mean that the new game will be bad. Or at least it doesn’t have to be worse than the previous ones, if someone considers them to be bad. Knowing this, I sat down in front of the TV a few days ago to warm up the PlayStation 5, which was considered sporty at the time, but is now considered a bit fat, to hold the DualSense with both hands, and to start playing all the FIFA games (and thus EA Sports FC 24’s) mandatory test match: Hungarian-Romanian.

In my memory, the memories of the previous years about some Hájpermós technology, which EA developers were talking about a few years ago as the messiah of the great football reform era. This year’s iteration, dubbed Hypermotion V, rumbles during matches, but don’t let that fool you. AV hardly represents a number here, since it is actually only the third generation of the technology that debuted in FIFA 22, and last year it only bore the low-end name Hypermotion 2.0. However, V is much more trendy, isn’t it?

FIF… EA Sports FC 24 is like the first time you meet the blood loop. When we hear its name, something quite ugly comes to mind, even if we don’t even look at it, we won’t necessarily be much more optimistic about it, but as soon as we taste it, all our preconceptions disappear into the fog. This is what happens when we start passing the ball around in the first games. The animation almost flows off the screen, if you look at it from a sufficient distance and don’t focus too much on the details, then it could even be a domestic county II match. The subtlety of the movements, the continuity, the transitions are jaw-droppingly detailed.

This is mostly true for replays as well. While last year I regularly saw kicking movements in FIFA 23 that would in reality be guaranteed to tear ankle or knee ligaments, they were somehow not typical here. Instead, the entire gameplay is a bit like watching slow motion. It’s so difficult, even the controlled player seems to be in a constant phase delay. Familiar, but strange.

I’m already a veteran Fifa player, I have twenty-four years and games under my belt. So, after the difficulty level of the first one or two games was easily set to medium and the average of six or seven goals scored in this way, I decided that it was time to enter the big ones and I set the difficulty higher. And it was the same again, which has been characteristic of the series (that is, its predecessor) for years: the difference between two levels of difficulty is enormous. In one of them, we beat Argentina with Andorra, and in the next, the goal against MI breaks our backs.

Speaking of WHAT. Let’s just say it’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. This can be seen especially when someone, say, starts a playing career and manages not the entire team, but a single player. In such cases, regardless of the degree of difficulty, they are capable of stunts that would fit into any New Year’s Eve cabaret. This also applies to goalkeepers, who one minute take the puck out of the opposite corner with the agility of Spider-Man, and the next the ball rolls past them into the net. It is impossible to predict what exactly will happen, as if Manuel Neuer and Loris Karius alternated between two actions in the goal.

By the way, the matches have a very real environment. You can even go into the dressing room, watch the commentators at halftime, and the stadiums have real life. But this is all usual, so in this area it is rather worth noting that we get a little more of everything than last year. There is no shortage of game modes either, as there is FUT, that is, now only UT as well. For many, this is the biggest attraction, I still haven’t been convinced that I should struggle every day for the rest of my life to have enough matches, not to have too many omissions, and to have a chance at all to get hold of players of an understandable level. I’ll leave that to the younger generation, this is a party for them.

However, it should be noted that although the amount of game modes can’t be complained about overall, the game still feels slimmer. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the FIFA fiasco, but there are significantly fewer national teams in the game (ours is there, with a surprisingly up-to-date squad). In the same way, women’s soccer is only present in the show, it is not really developed, which is now starting to be a little embarrassing, since they have been present in the game for years, it would be time to deal with them more seriously.

In addition to the above, I also encountered some hair-raisingly amateur errors. With things that would be considered bloodthirsty even for an indie project, let alone an EA Sports cash cow. Not to mention anything else, it happened that during a transfer, my negotiator forgot his body at home, and only the neck and head came to the meeting: the rest of the model was lost somewhere in the codes.

However, with this and its other silliness, EA Sports FC 24 didn’t do badly. Apart from the title, there is no major reform, no one should expect that from him, because he will be disappointed. But when was the last really big reform in FIFA? Okay, maybe Hypermotion can be taken for that. EA Sports FC 24 can do just as much more than FIFA 23 than it did last year compared to FIFA 22. In light of this, let everyone decide for themselves whether this year’s game is a disappointment or not.

The test copy was provided by the game’s domestic distributor, ALSO.