FIFA Soccer 06

"Good gameplay but lacking important features"

This is the first football game for the DS. I have played this for about 80 hours and can really do no more with it so I decided to review it.

First impressions : 22 playable leagues, 10000 players, create your own team, 5 year career mode. Seems good so far. Menus are well designed and very easy to navigate. Music is ok if you like it.

Playing a match : It takes only about 3 seconds to load up a game. The game features pretty good commentary for a handheld. The lower screen is used as a radar and for some special team instructions such as all out attack and all out defend as well as others. The controls are normal FIFA controls and are quite intuitive, it won't take long to get used to them. The game runs smoothly and I never noticed any slowdown. You can even save at any time during a match. In game graphics however are really poor. Players and stadia are all generic, but you can clearly see alll the action. There are also several good camera views.

AI : There are 4 levels of difficulty. As you increase the difficulty the opponents defences become better and they will function much better as a team. The strikers will pose more of a threat. After about 10 hours you can probably be good enough to beat the best teams in the game (Milan, Real Madrid, Arsenal, Man United etc) with the worst (Barnet, Nacional etc) on the most difficult setting. So after not very long you will be able to outplay the AI. Your own teams AI is ok but there are times when you wish that strikers would make more off the ball runs. There is one thing that the opponent AI can do nothing against - through balls. For soem raeson through balls work amazingly well and you can easily score 3 or 4 in a match by exploiting this.

Competitions : You can play in the World Cup, the Champions League, UEFA Cup as well as cup competitions from every league in the game. There are 15 rout challenges and 15 comeback challenges for you to win as well. Theses are based on real life matches from last season. You can also play a single season without any cup competions or promotion/relegation worries.

Career mode : This is where you will spend most of your time. You play through 5 seasons and at the start of every season your aim is to complete the objectives you are set by the club's board. This mode is just like real life ie. promotion/relegation, cup matches, European matches etc. Your teams starts off with no prestige stars. You can gain a maximum of 5 and each time you do you get the chance to improve one area of your teams abilities. This is what is used as training. There is no transfer feature and the game is not fully updated for August's transfer window.

Create club : You can create your own team and make them as good or bad as you want. This is where in my view replayability comes in. I created a really pathetic team and put them in the Premiership and tasked them with achieving a treble within 4 seasons. I eventually managed this but it took me a long time and I got a good play time out of the game.

Score : I gave this game a 6 (about average) because it has good gameplay but lacks important features - transfers, proper training, more difficulty etc. If you need a ffotball game for the DS then this will be a ggod purchase.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/28/06