《EA Sports FC 27》评测

Smart iterations and steady developments mark a decent forward step for EA's FC series, amidst the usual cynicism.

The most touching of additions, in EA Sports FC 27, is a mode called The Grounds. This is an online social hub, where your custom avatar can roam and rise. It's touching not for its play – which lets you challenge people to rounds of Rush football, where the ghosts of Volta and Fifa Street happily haunt – but for its look. There are three open hub areas to explore, one styled on the UK, another on Paris, and a third on Argentina. The streets are clean, and cluttered by bustling NPCs. Here and there are luminous white-domed kiosks, with all the promise of an artist's impression of an upcoming Heathrow terminal. If I didn't know better, I'd say that the developers at EA Vancouver and EA Romania were paying homage to PlayStation Home. There, too, you could list through weird streets and glassy booths, clad in store-bought clothes, and beat other players in mini-games of all kinds. There, too, you felt the looming threat of a shutdown.

Whether The Grounds will last I'm not sure. There is fleeting fun to be had. Rush is five-a-side, but you can also do one-on-one, two-on-two, and three-on-three modes. (The queuing is zippy, but you are occasionally undone by lag.) Plus, there are also goofy distractions, such as Balloon Ball, Bocce Ball, and Bucket Ball. These are spins on other games, the latter a basketball twist that has you dink high and dippy shots into a hoop. Frankly these diversions don't offer much nourishment. If EA really wanted to give staying power to The Grounds, a swift partnership with Sega would do the trick; imagine booting AiAi and his pals to and fro in frenzied rounds of Monkey Target. For more sober fare, there are also Clubhouse Matches, with full eleven-a-side games – though you can more quickly play others online in traditional exhibitions.

As it stands, The Grounds are shaky, but the good news this year is that the meat of the on-pitch action has been tuned up and slowed down. Here, of course, is where you might reasonably protest that the tuning-up and slowing-down is always the case. And that it's not just EA (over the course of several after-launch patches) but us who speed it back up again – who probe its gaps and find ways to bend the annual innovations toward exploitative silliness. In FC 25, for instance, the close-control dribble gave you the ability to rend chasms in an opposing team's press, and there are signs that FC 27 may yet suffer from an equivalent, in the off-balance dribble. This nifty quirk grants certain attackers the power of the Weeble: namely, to wobble and not fall down in the face of opposing pressure. They slip through a defender's rough jostle and stagger onwards. It looks great, and stressfully animated, which I imagine is exactly what you will be, after suffering it thirty or so times.

To step back a little, at the outset, in FC 27, you choose between Competitive Gameplay, which "favours speed, responsiveness, and reliable outcomes"; or Authentic Gameplay, "a new, slower-paced, more measured experience." I went for Authentic and am pleased to report that matches have a weightier texture. There is a greater emphasis on manual defending, with far less help from AI teammates. The Teammate Contain function now means that your AI defenders will mark an attacking player but keep a greater distance from them. This gives you more time to switch to right defender and take on the task manually. Switching to your desired defender is intuitive, and it feels good to snuff out an attack with clever positioning. Through balls – once the easy steak knife for the gristle of the back line – are harder to pull off, with lobbed versions currently in favour online. Matches play out in the midfield with pleasing heft, and the act of scoring a goal – the white ripple, the hum and shake of the stadium – is crunchy and thrilling.

Elsewhere, EA has rejigged set pieces, with corner kicks now slower and more cerebral. After the kick is taken, the camera zooms into the box; you can then make runs or shield the ball. The biggest change this year is Avoidance. Holding a shoulder button, you make your chosen player more slippy; like Altaïr in Assassin's Creed, they nudge and shimmy through crowds. It's a lively addition and adds a tactical edge. Crossing is now looser, with a ball more likely to find its way into a general area. This means you need to measure them out more, aim accurately, and develop a sense for pace and space.

Another of EA's proper-noun updates is Attacking Spatial Awareness. This, supposedly, makes your attacking teammates more likely to make intelligent runs – not, say, into crowded pockets but more propitious lanes of offence. Personally, I found this hit and miss. Maybe I lack the offensive nose to sniff out chances, but often I would pinball passes around the mid-field, only for one of my players to make a curving run away from the action before I clocked what they were up to. Still, if the takeaway from this is that Bruno Fernandes may just have a keener sense than I do about where I ought to pass, I'm happy to defer to him – and to apologise for my shortcomings if he feels sore about it.

What's more, teams are authentic to their real-life counterparts. With the various heartbreaks of summer still in mind, I first fired up an exhibition between Spain and Argentina. Sure enough, after a brace of yellows, a pulled shirt, and a hard shove, the result felt akin to the company of the Bolshoi Ballet squaring off against the cast of Rockstar's The Warriors. Less convincing are the swoops and flashes of the presentation. A meeting between Middlesbrough and Newcastle began with a satellite shot of the Earth, diving in cyber-zoom to the grounds of St. James' Park, as if it were the site of the next assignment for Captain Price and the merry men of Task Force 141.

Indeed EA Sports FC and Call of Duty share an odd resemblance. Both are the products of vast publishers. Both grind and shunt their way to a yearly schedule. Both, bewilderingly, have featured the likenesses of Lionel Messi, Neymar Jr., and Paul Pogba. And both yield a core experience wrapped in other modes that have, over time, become the bloated main event. For Activision, the single-player campaign increasingly seems weary and wan next to the behemoth of Warzone. For EA, the fundamental exhibition match, along with the Career mode, have given way to Ultimate Team.

FUT remains as morally murky and spirit-sapping as ever. The debate as to whether or not it constitutes gambling has been aired, and various countries have arrived at different conclusions. The technical answer, according to the UK Gambling Commission, is that, no, as the virtual items lack a mechanism to be cashed out for real currency, it isn't gambling. (In an interesting development, PEGI has certified the game a 16+, the first such certificate in the series, for its use of loot boxes.) But you can see why Victor Zagury, a Parisian lawyer who challenged EA in court, said to L'Équipe, about people hooked on Ultimate Team: "It is the logic of a casino that has entered their homes."

In FC 27, Ultimate Team is largely unchanged. You buy packs of random cards, with either earned FC Coins or real money, assemble squads, complete objectives, and battle other players online. The two most notable changes this year are the Gallery, and the way that squad-building challenges work. The Gallery has you array your cards as you would in a sticker book and earn Gallery Tokens, to be spent on kits and badges. As players and items pass through your Ultimate Team club, they can be enshrined in your Gallery. It's one part memory catalogue to one part deck builder. You can curate your Gallery into sets – clubs, nations, etc. – and these are then graded. You earn Gallery Tokens, which you can spend in the store on trinkets and cosmetics. Designed to deepen the essential draw of Ultimate Team, the Gallery feels surplus to requirements.

The more meaningful change is the way that squid-building challenges work. SBCs have been part of Ultimate Team for years, but in FC 27 they are faster. Rather than having to concentrate on your squad's chemistry or its overall rating, you can just submit items simply based on their rarity and ratings. It uses the same grade-scoring system that you have in the Gallery. Essentially, it means you can make partial progress faster, as you don't need to worry about the full requirements of every challenge. It's a smart tweak; it means quicker gratification and offers a more regular drip of reward. For those whose love the mode, Ultimate Team remains as moreish, frustrating, and brain-crackling as nicotine.

For those who prefer to stay away – and perhaps to sidestep the fuming ethical rumpus altogether – the Manager and Player Career modes have some welcome tweaks. Dynamic OVR, one of this year's better tweaks, has players' overall ratings fluctuate over the season. They have strong baseline abilities, of course; Dani Olmo is never going to plummet to a level where he would be happier in a Sunday League, but his form will surge and slump as matches wear on. It's a welcome change, giving a freer and more organic feel as the season passes. Injuries, play time, team-mate rivalries: there are a number of things that cause a player's Dynamic OVR to shift. It means your squad can punch above its own weight, if several of your players are performing above their usual form. It also means your success can be hampered, and that you need to make strategic changes.

Transfers are now slower, as you need to check with other clubs to see if any are actually possible, then negotiate a price, be it monetary, player swaps, or bonuses. Meanwhile, other clubs can swoop in and foment a bidding war. You will be relieved to hear that negotiations now take place in a dedicated and zippy menu. These are clean and intuitive, and see deals play out with a tension meter: high tension means that talks may break down, low tension that they are more likely to progress smoothly. You can negotiate with players directly and with clubs, and you can now opt to pay in installments – very useful if your budget is tight but you need an injection of star power.

There are also signing fees and agent fees to complicate proceedings. You can low-ball a club with your offer but sweeten the pot with a cluttering of bonuses. An extra five million if you qualify for the Champions League. Another couple million if they make over ten appearances, and so forth. There is a peculiar pleasure in sifting through these variables, in cleaning up a club's finances through shrewd business – or by being a bastard. Try slicing down an agent's fee or a weekly wage, leveraging a player's desire to be at your club (or their apathy toward another club trying to outbid you), despite raising tensions, and you feel Gordon Gekko on the beach with one of those mobile phones the size of a shoe. Throughout all this, there are also moments of randomness that make you laugh, such as an e-mail informing you that your centre forward has injured his hand in a cooking mishap, at home. So now you know: the threats that await any budding team include not just the whims of opposing managers and the perils of club debt, but an all-too-foolhardy attempt at risotto.

EA has made some solid iterations this year, then. The Grounds comes across as a frippery, Ultimate Team rumbles ever on, but FC 27 brings meaningful changes to the fluidity and speed of play. Given that its practical football-game monopoly is more or less unchallenged, EA could do a lot less than this (hardly the quote its PR people would want on the posters, granted), and in previous years it has done a lot less than this. But until something really moves underfoot, and someone else – FIFA and 2K seem likely – puts out a rival, this is what we have. An excellent on-pitch experience, packaged with cynicism, smart moves, controversy, and bursts of joy. Rather like football.

A copy of EA Sports FC 27 was provided for this review by EA Sports.