However, perhaps FIFA’s worst aspect has been successfully addressed: player movement. In pretty much all versions of FIFA since FIFA 2000 for the PlayStation, player movement has been a mess – forwards would start runs but halt them just as you attempted to pass to them, and defenders would, annoyingly, rush out past opposing attackers, towards the half-way line.
The latter still happens to a small extent, but at least the game is sufficiently responsive that you can bring them back before your adversary is in on goal. And a clever new system, in which you hold down the left trigger and tip the left stick towards a player will tell that player to go on a run. Thanks to an immeasurably improved passing system, in which you can achieve just as much accuracy as you can in PES 6, it’s now possible to play defence-splitting through-balls. Which is just as well, since you can no longer dribble through entire defences. All of which brings about much more realistic games of football, in terms of both look and feel.
Much has been written about how FIFA 07 slavishly apes the slower, more considered PES 6, but that just isn’t true, at least on the Xbox 360. It makes PES 6 feel sluggish and ponderous, and FIFA 07’s shooting system, while making you work harder than previous versions in terms of setting your shooting angle, is infinitely more forgiving than that of PES 6, which makes you stab the shoot button for a mere fraction of a second unless you want to balloon the ball into the stands.
As ever, FIFA 07 features a full license to recreate all the clubs in Europe, and its main single-player mode, in which you take the reins of your chosen team and play through an accurate reconstruction of a real season, is spot-on, taking just the right amount of cues from football management games without getting in the way of the action. Online, it’s a revelation, with the lag which traditionally afflicts football games (in which you have to anticipate opponents’ moves and press buttons about a second before you would in single-player mode) at last absent. And it has a flash, if gimmicky, ticker bringing real football news.
SPOnG Score: B+
In short, FIFA 07 on the Xbox 360 – which, admittedly, should be treated as an entirely different game than the current-gen versions of FIFA 07 – is a contender. Those who have never developed a fanaticism for PES will be able to argue, for the first time since the days of the PlayStation, that it is at least as good as the latest version of PES, if not better. PES-lovers, of course, will stick with what they know, and quite rightly, since PES 6, also is an excellent game. But the latest next-gen iteration of FIFA has been improved beyond all recognition.
king skins 30 Oct 2006 17:17