A lot of you might think that the big moneymaker for EA Sports is Madden NFL. True, it makes a bundle with the football crowd, but one license that’s easily overlooked by some audiences is the FIFA brand. Soccer is a hugely popular sport around the world, and throughout the years, EA Sports has made a series of games that have accurately recreated the sport of soccer in video games, with last year’s effort, FIFA 11, being the best to date. Well, at that point, anyway, because the latest soccer champ, FIFA Soccer 12, has taken the field, and it scores even better than ever. Rather than going all out and making drastic changes to formula that would probably turn the soccer community on its head, EA Sports makes minor tweaks to the game so that it flows better naturally. While that doesn’t sound like much, you’ll notice within the first few seconds on the field just what kind of impact these changes make.
For instance, the new defensive tactics. Instead of calling on your fellow teammates to corner someone with the ball and avoiding a pass, you now have to carefully shadow the active player, keeping on them but not getting close enough that you’ll be tempted to use a sliding kick that will earn you a referee’s penalty card. Now, if they do manage to slip you, jostling is available. This is basically a small attempt to get the ball to slip loose from their legs, such as tugging at their shirt to stop their momentum or hitting them with a slight arm tap. Again, the referee watches out for this carefully, so don’t make too much of a habit of it. But these small techniques really help the flow of gameplay, and when you have the ball offensively, you can use dribbling. No, this isn’t like basketball dribbling, but rather being able to control the direction of the ball’s movement with your feet by way of small taps on the analog stick. You don’t want to press too far in, or you’ll change their direction, but with this technique, you can fool an incoming player, zigzagging them (so to speak) and continuing to make your way towards the net.
The rest of FIFA 12’s package handles with utmost precision and care, whether you’re trying to get the lucky once off with a header following a corner kick, or using the goalie to get a last second shot bouncing out of bounds. Every part of this game handles beautifully, and we didn’t once find an instance where we were like, “What the hell happened?” EA Sports has managed to firmly take hold of EXACTLY how someone should play on a soccer field. How they could possibly refine it more for FIFA 13 is beyond us…but then again, that’s what we said last year. Better still, you can make adjustments to your game, should you think that the goalie’s going too soft on you (or, in Brazil’s case, too difficult) or want to give your team a passing advantage over the AI. Just make sure you don’t get too used to these creature comforts, because a lot of players are waiting for your challenge online.
This feature review concludes on the next page, please click Page 2 below to read our final thoughts on EA Sports' FIFA Soccer 12.
