Jason Miller

All fifa games have progressively gotten worse on their shortfalls year after year. The player switching system is terrible. Essentially, mid game, a directional flick on the right thumb stick will manually switch to the player you want, but it prefers to cycle through the formation. Just move around on the team management menu and you’ll see the frustration in its simplest form. It’s the same on the pitch, except now everything is moving and the formation has become more fluid. The offside system has become dramatically worse year after year. No longer can you pull a person off of a run when they will be offside after receiving it. No longer can you remove the offside individual from play when the intended and actual receiver is onside. You’ll still get the whistle. Additionally, The forwards’ positioning is consistently terrible. No one tries to move in and out of the offside line so often and so poorly as a fifa cpu controlled forward. Even with the best forwards in the game and the mentality shifted into more attack side mindsets, no one makes a quality run. Not that you could see, because the camera angles don’t encourage end to end play or even longer through balls into space. There is a command to direct a cpu player on a route. These routes are also terrible and most often vertical with slight variance. Midfielders do not fade into pockets and instead either push too close to defenders to receive a ball (forget about checking to) or they stay too deep to be apart of the attack. Defensively, forget about offside traps. They continue to sprint right past an attacker. That’s a good 5 meters of rushing and disregarding any person dribbling towards you. So why rely on it anyway it that’s what it’s supposed to do? Because the defenders play American style defense. They act like cornerbacks playing man to man coverage and forgetting that their individual positions puts the whole offense inside. Stop trying to endlessly run with your mark. That’s insane. God love the fifa swim move. Ever accidentally move into the area of a teammate and they do a swim move for 3 to 4 strides? Introducing the Fifa Swim Move. Doesn’t matter if you jockey, though it helps. You’ll still concede a goal because the person you’re controlling just fifa swam around a third individual and the forward dribbled right past. Finally, possibly the worst part of fifa. Despite being the top soccer/ football game franchise, the CPU’s strategic ability is terrible. At some point turning up the difficulty or playing harder teams does not actually make the opposition better. It makes your team worse. More errors. Poorer positioning. Slower responses. More imperfect passes. People complain of scripting. I get it. Please make the opposition harder sometimes. But don’t accomplish that by nerfing my squad. It’s often more fun to get a real blood blister and a dead leg in pickup than to turn on the game system.