FIFA 22 - Review

With no alarms and no surprises. EA Sports has pumped out yet another incremental update to its football simulation series. FIFA 22's graphical upgrades and new animation technology make the beautiful game feel better, with goals demanding a more deliberate and rewarding play style. Aside from those minor but largely positive tweaks, this is the same game in a new pair of pants, which means its microtransactions are just as eager as ever to get you to turn your pockets inside out.

If you've made the leap to a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, the aesthetic facelift is noticeable. It's mostly little things that stick out, like the way a football shirt catches a player's skin or the forehead sheen of a busy winger. There's still a very obvious gulf in consistency between character models, though.

If you're a perennial Fifa player, you'll know that graphical bumps are nice to have, but gameplay is king, and this is where Fifa 22 has made some meaningful progression. Most of the improvements this year can be attributed to hyper motion, a new motion capture technology that helps to make Fifa 22 feel more fluid on new gen consoles by adding over 4,000 new animations harvested from real-life matches.

This may sound like brain-numbing marketing jargon, but the change to the way players move actually results in tangible improvements on the pitch. A forward's legs will buckle from the momentum after they ping a shot in the top corner from outside of the box; players will react naturally to the blowback from a strong pass; and wingers with high dribbling stats will feel more flexible in the box.

FIFA 22 is a slower game than FIFA 21, but that doesn't mean it's all about defense. There's not a lack of goals. You just have to earn them with careful passing play and a healthy dose of vision. Patience often seems to trump pace, which is very refreshing. Players like Jack Greelish and Jaden Sanchez are a real challenge to track with the new explosive sprint mechanic, letting them leave you in the dust with a knock on if you don't jockey to read their run.

It can get hectic as the opposition closes in on goal, and this is where player switching becomes a bit too frantic as you try to fill all the gaps in your armor. If they manage a finesse shot from outside the box, it's usually game over. The goalkeeper's fingers aren't as buttery as last year, but even talented shot stoppers can fumble under pressure and leave you scratching your head.

It's much harder to get past them in basic one-on-ones, but a quick fake shot or a long cross across the box seems to give them an existential crisis. The career mode is very similar to FIFA 21 but with a few new additions, such as the ability to create a club. In this separate mode, you'll replace an existing team and make your own crest, kit, and stadium, tweaking the board's expectations to your liking.

If you've got the budget, you can scoop up some top-tier players too. It's a neat idea, but in practice, it's much more fun to take a real club in an exciting direction instead of developing a squad of randomly generated androids. Player The new career mode now offers rpg-style objectives in each match that you must complete to build a relationship with your manager.

Think of it as a visual novel, except you're trying to romance Steve Bruce into putting you in the starting eleven of Newcastle United. This is a lot of fun if you create your own player, as it features a massive skill tree of attributes to upgrade and perks to unlock that help the whole team. Volta Football edges closer but doesn't quite commit to being the new FIFA Street Game we're all hoping for this time.

There's no story mode, but it leans further into absurdity with abilities that give you supernatural powers on the pitch, such as lightning pace and deadly shots. But Volta's most interesting new addition annoyingly comes only at the weekends. Volta Arcade has you competing online in fusion frenzy style party mini-games where you can hone some important skills.

Tense games of foot tennis help with crossing, while disco lava has you dribbling carefully to steal squares from your opponents. It feels more worthwhile than repeating skill games, so it's just baffling that you can't play Volta Arcade whenever you want, over an ultimate team. basedmultiplayer It's another year of minor revisions to a formula that clearly works very well for everyone, even if it delivers waves of Stockholm syndrome to many players.

Some extra stadium customization options help make your club feel more like home, and the division rivals framework has been made more forgiving with checkpoints and seasonal rewards. It'd be great to see a training mode that lets you play skill games with your ultimate team to get used to how they play together ahead of matches.

He controlled this free kick brilliantly. He gets it over the wall using the inside of his foot. The online multiplayer is what's worth sticking around for, for it's as palm wedding and foot twitching as ever, with the meta skill in flux as FIFA 21 players throw off the complacency that 99-rated end-of-year cards afford.

Gone are the days when you would tremble in fear of your opponent's team before a match too, as the PlayStation 5's SSSD and a solid internet connection pretty much erase the loading process. Absolutely brilliant, and if you embrace the absurdity of ultimate team, you can still have a good bit of fun without feeding ea's golden goose.

Why not build a j1 league team centered around the 54-year old bronze striker, Kazuyoshi Miura, and force out a few tasty rage quits? Fleeting satisfaction aside, it's still not worth getting sucked into the billion dollar money vortex for the sake of a few good cards. Regardless of your approach, all roads eventually lead to loot boxes.

It should be noted that ea has fully implemented preview packs that let you look inside one loot box every day before you buy, but even so, the microtransactions are still very much front and center here. Ea is not yet brave enough to tame the rampaging elephant in the room, and FIFA 22 suffers for it.

FIFA 22 heralds the next generation of virtual football, and while it doesn't reinvent the ball, the attacking and defending gameplay gains moment-to-moment fluidity.