The UEFA European Football Championships for 2012 started just a few weeks ago. You know what that means right? It's time for another cash in game from FIFA charging us Football (soccer) fans for another full priced game. Actually no this year the guys at EA actually did the smart and really cool thing of releasing the Euro’s as a DLC add on pack that is now just over 1200 points (25% off). Finally EA has done something right and it doesn’t look like they have skimped on content either even though selling it at a very reduced rate.

There are 4 different game modes to keep you interested, you can bring in your created character from the full FIFA 12 game and advance his skills further and there is also a full online competition game mode.

The game plays exactly the same as the original FIFA game, all of the superstars are unchanged and have the exact same stats and look exactly the same (expect for the kit they are wearing, obviously). But as I said above the really interesting part about this game are the type of modes it lets you play in. Obviously the main element of the game is the Euro 2012 Championship. You get to choose your team from any country in the competition and play as them through the group stage and then hopefully through to the final. After playing through this game mode you realise why EA have added so much more to this expansion because basically if all goes well in this competition you only get to play 6 matches. Which we all can agree paying any money for that would be a fucking rip off. I played through this mode in little over 2 hours and won the European Championships with England and won (at least I got to see it even if it was virtual).

So because this mode is so small EA have added a few extra game modes to keep people who bought this add on’s attention. The first is a Challenge mode where the developers will set everyone who plays the game a challenge for each day of the Championships. The challenge will will depend on a recent match in the Competition. For example the one that I played was the France match from earlier in the week. In the real match France lost 1-0. My challenge was to turn that defecit around in the 82nd minute and go on to win the match. That was actually pretty tough and took me 3 or 4 attempts.

The game mode that interested me the most though was the Exhibition mode. In this mode you create a player (or import one from the main game) and you are randomly assigned a team (a proper shite one too) made of players from around Europe. You then choose a group to join and play against those teams. At the start you only have 1 team to face but as you beat them you open up a ‘road’ to another country (and it basically carries on from there, more wins more roads more teams to play). When you beat a country you get given one of that country's players to add to your squad. The 1st time you win the country you receive a reserve player, the 2nd time is a sub and if you beat the team a 3rd and final time you receive a member of their main squad. This feature reminds me a little of the old NBA street games and I actually fucking love it. Also for beating a team you receive that squads photograph to add to a mosaic. When finished the Mosaic will have a photo of every Countries squad in the game. This mode in my opinion is by far the best mode in the game and maybe in FIFA in general.

There is also an online mode letting you play with friends and randoms over Xbox live. I personally suck pretty bad at the game. So haven’t really played this mode and don’t really expect to anytime soon.

Overall I think that the DLC expansion is pretty fucking awesome. Its a great price and you actually receive a hell of allot of content for your money. If you like FIFA 12 I would recommend this as a must buy. Go get it now while its still on Sale.