Game Reviews

FIFA Online Review

by admin posted Jul 27,2010

FIFA online is a free online soccer MMO game. It has nice little features such as limited energy and the ability to restore health, but like any other game little nice features alone simply don’t complete the picture. Its graphics are of decent grade and the game play is mouse oriented. It has a decent league AI system and online ranking system. The game play is very basic, and it comes with a straight forward and easy to comprehend tutorial. In play, you simply click on a member of your team to pass. You click anywhere on the field to kick the ball to that location, and you click a player that has the ball while your next to them to take it. You can also right click on a player to do a more violent tackle type move to take away the ball. However, the more violent move can result in penalties. It has a very good response time and uses peer to peer (which makes it very exploitable in my opinion). It’s addicting but the game play feels a bit bland. It just does not take a lot of thought process; although to make up in part it does require a fast reaction time leading it to be at least a little addictive.

The game graphics are on a decent level but nowhere near any visual extremes. It feels a bit immersive and then cut short. The animations are very smooth and the game conserves memory, so there is little fear of crashing a graphics card. Everything meshes correctly and you don’t have to deal with the visual oddity of visible mesh-lines like in some other games. Pleasantly, there are no graphical mess-ups and the visuals feel fluid. There are no particle effects or anything of the like. Its graphics are somewhat refreshing, but that is quickly cut off by the bad camera angles that can block your view of your own players making for a sometimes-aggravating experience.

The Ambient sounds are better than some I have come across in gaming but are not amazing or innovative. First off, you have the announcer: he has an Australian accent, which is good quality, but they didn’t record too many different things for him to say, so the voice becomes redundant rather quickly. The announcer has a reaction for everything, but only one type of reaction for each thing for the most part, leaving little to be surprised by. The sound effects are admirable, except for the fact that some things you would expect to have a larger reaction instead barely make a sound. When you violently attack, trying to get the soccer ball there should be a sound of crunching or a grunt of pain at least. There are some realistic ambient sounds for actions and few other things. There is some barely noticeable music that almost seems to be there for the sole purpose of altering your mood, as its barely perceivable over the other sounds in game, thus not of a level for general music appreciation. The sound is more of a background thing besides crowd cheering and the announcer, but overall it’s pretty solid. I still see it as having potential and hope the programmers get back to working on it soon.

There are a lot of betas that almost have no chance at all, but this is one of the few I have seen in a while that actually may have some good potential, although sports games are easy to make, and thus tend to flood the market making their odds of getting played slighter. I still think this is a decent game. But it has more to evolve game play and graphics wise. I believe FIFA will become slightly intuitive and actually stand up to some of the other games out there. This game is along the lines of a good time waster, but not a waste of their time to make.

Game play:5.6/10

Graphics:3.4/10

Music and Sounds:4.5/10

Overall(not an average):4.9/10

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