FIFA Soccer 09

"This is the Season... and it actually is this time."

FIFA 09 - When you realise that you love the sport but can't play it for ****.

Every year, a new battle in an epic war breaks out. These battles are normally one-sided, but, more to the point, rather shameful, as two titans of the "Change as little as possible and slap a new number on it" mantra slog it out. But recently, these battles have become more even, mainly because one side has dropped this mantra, and replaced it with, "Yes, we're trying. We didn't see it coming either." This is the war between the developers of the two leading football games - EA and Konami, makers of the FIFA and PES franchises. And this time, EA has finally produced the better product - mainly because they put some effort in.

It never ceases to amaze me how a Canadian branch of EA Sports develops the football games. An American branch would be bad enough, but... Canada?! Do they even play the sport? Perhaps this is what caused so much blundering in FIFA's long history. Since 1994, EA has been churning out annual iterations of their hit franchise, FIFA Football. After early promise, it soon became apparant that each iteration improved only marginally on the last (a theme which spread to EA Sports' other titles), leading to Konami deciding that they could easily out-do EA's shoddy sense of value for money. For instance, for FIFA Football 2005, you essentially paid £40 for a First-Touch system which could be mastered in around 1 minute. The rest was just FIFA 2004 with a crappy soundtrack and a menu style which, bizarrely, induced headaches in some people. Konami, on the other hand, were producing Pro Evolution Soccer, a franchise which since its beginning had outsold and outperformed FIFA. This changed for the FIFA 07 era, when EA put quite a bit of effort in and produced a game that challenged PES, but then FIFA 08 was one step forward and two steps back. And now, with PES adopting EA's cocky inclination to stop trying, FIFA 09 has proved to out-do PES2009 and shame Konami.

Like FIFA 07, this game doesn't introduce any really big, marketable features in the vein of Off the Ball Control, First Touches and Team Chemistry (two of which were scrapped two years after their respective inceptions) but instead focuses on the core gameplay, and still introduces a few great little features which will always keep you coming back for more.

First there's FIFA 09 Clubs. This is a fantastic feature where you and two other people form a club, and play against other self-formed clubs of up to 3 people. Basically it's your standard online match except you always have at least two teammates, you always play with the same people (the people that are in your club) and, most ingeniously of all, every footballer has a rating of 85, meaning that whether you win, lose or draw comes down to your raw skill and not what team you pick. It's a great little mode that has kept me and many others hooked since release in October, and is great fun with friends.

Then there's Online Leagues. This mode lets you invite up to 10 friends into a self-formed league and play each other, a la Premiership or MLS, with the winner being decided by whoever has the most points at the end. It's a great way to see who's really the best out of you and your friends and have a bit of friendly competition.

There's also the new Be-a-Pro modes. Firstly there's an offline mode called Be-A-Pro: Seasons where you have up to four seasons with your created player to turn him into a club and international legend. There's also Be-A-Pro: 10 VS 10, which is perhaps the bravest new mode of the lot. Up to 20 people join one lobby, everyone picks a player and then you're playing in what is probably the closest to simulating a real football match there's ever been in games. The only downside is that, obviously, having 20 people in one match can lead to some lag and, also, there's no really good camera for either Be-A-Pro mode. There's either the Tele camera (the camera used for normal matches), which focuses on the ball, not your player, meaning you can't always see yourself, and the Be-A-Pro camera, which focuses on your player in a 3rd person view (like you see in Gears of War), but this means you can't see what's going on behind you.

There's also a new mode called Adidas Live Season, where information concerning players' performance in real matches is uploaded onto the servers, which you can download for use in the Online Modes. For instance, if Steven Gerrard scores a hat-trick in a Premiership game, his Live Season rating will go up to around 95, whereas if he gets sent off and misses a penalty in a game, his rating will go down to around 70. Live Season is available for the Premiership, Ligue 1, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and the Mexican Premier League (yeah, I'm not too sure about the reasoning behind that last one either). Unfortunately, a subscription for a league costs 560 Microsoft Points, but there is a free trial until July of this year for one league on the back of the manual, and that's likely all you'll want anyway.

And, finally, there's a new mode which has come to the Marketplace for FIFA 09, called Ultimate Team. Featuring already in UEFA Champions League 2006, this mode lets you collect cards with players on them, arrange them into a team and play online or offline matches with them. You also need to obtain Contract Cards to make sure that your players don't become out of contract and disappear, and you can get training cards which will help make your players better at the beautiful game. I'd suggest you download the videos explaining it off XBOX Live as the mode is so big (the download is 1.6GB, the size of some XBOX Original games) it could easily have a whole review to itself. But, to summarise it; it really is great fun, well worth the price (800 MSP) and the only problems are that it's a bit buggy and that there's an option to buy packs of cards off XBOX Live for real money, as well as using the in-game Coins, meaning some people buy lots of Gold packs using Microsoft Points and have a team of superstars already, 3 weeks after release. But it's well worth the buy. This mode also brings back the estranged feature of Team Chemistry (the big thing of FIFA 06, phased out by FIFA 08), and now you must play players of the same nationality in the same areas, and make sure that their preferred formation matches the one you're using.

Well, there you have it. FIFA 09 also has a great soundtrack, a couple of smaller features which, if you buy the game, you'll discover on your own, and basically everything that was in FIFA 08 (except a few small things like Keeper Control). It's well worth the buy and has plenty of people in its online modes even now, 6 months after release. It seems that this particular battle of "wits" between EA and Konami has gone EA's way, but let's hope the same amount of effort goes into FIFA 10... 2010... One Zero... whatever they're calling it.

FINAL SCORE; 9/10; With only a few slight problems and the fact that it'll become outdated in less than year holding back the score, this is a must-buy for any PES or FIFA fan.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/13/09

Game Release: FIFA 09 (EU, 10/03/08)