Most people in the world can relate to the game of soccer (association football). It is the most watched and most popular sport on the entire planet. Naturally, there are a lot of game incarnations that depict this prestigious pastime. FIFA Street tends to steer towards the five-a-side football that a lot of avid fans in the UK would have played a lot of. Personally, I play 5-a-side nearly every week in an organized league with official rules and regulations. With FIFA Street 3, none of these rules and regulations are present. There are no fouls, no offsides and no handballs which should point towards a free flowing, uninterrupted game right? Read on.
FIFA Street is both developed and published by EA of Canada. As a result, there is the usual polished presentation that most games that come from EA have. Once the disc has been booted up, you get the usual EA HD screens along with the FIFA logo which shows that the game has been officially licensed by the governing body themselves. A quick start button push then brings up the main menu which clearly shows all the game types and options available to the player. The descriptions for each game type are not so clear so you must wait for the caption to scroll across which explains what ‘Playground Picks’ means. The best option is ‘play now’ which allows you to play a one-off game in any game type you choose. There are 18 international teams including England, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and the USA. When you play a match with any of these teams you have to pick your best starting line up of 5 players from a selection of well known footballers from each nation. You can also create your own custom team using the ‘Playground Picks’.
There are 6 game types in total. ‘Score’ is a normal match with the first team to score a certain amount of goals is the winner. ‘Score difference’ is the first team to go at least two goals in front although you can increase the margin up to 10 goals if you wanted. ‘Headers and volleys’ is the popular game we all played in the playground. You have to score a goal by both flicking the ball up for yourself and smashing it or receive an aerial pass from a teammate and score off the volley/header. The ‘Gamebreaker’ game type will be familiar to anyone that has played the previous versions of FIFA Street which I will be addressed in more detail further in the review.
Graphically, FIFA Street is very hard to explain. I suppose the easiest way for me to describe them is a cross between the cartoon style graphics of Team Fortress 2 for the players and Dead or Alive style for the ‘arenas’. Some of the players in FIFA Street 3 are fantastic and funny to look at. Peter Crouch for example is beautifully over-exaggerated. He is stick thin and lanky on the game proving that the people over at EA Canada have a great sense of humour and have studied the popular players to no end. Mark Viduka and Wayne Rooney are both overly huge too. The animation on the players is very good especially when performing skill moves and tricks. The arenas are very colourful but lifeless. Overall, the games look cool when playing but what I can’t understand is that the frame rate seems to be low for the amount of things going on at any one time. It should really be running at about 60fps realistically speaking.
