FIFA 17

FIFA 17 leaves me feeling very conflicted. The game plays really well. For the first time in a couple years, developer EA Canada has finally made some useful advancements in the gameplay. The improved attacking AI leads to more fluid attacking moves across the board. The general pace of play carries a greater resemblance to its real-life counterpart than it ever has. Holding down the run button to burst past lumbering defenders isn’t the superpower it has been in previous iterations. The de-emphasis on pure speed encourages more thoughtful styles of play, centered more around passing than athleticism. The defensive AI is more alert and organized than before, leading to more pervasive tackling and a more challenging experience.

Scoring opportunities are harder to come by, but I found that challenge to be more enjoyable than frustrating. When you do have chances to score, FIFA 17 offers more ways for you get goals. By hitting the circle button (or by pressing b if you’re on the Xbox), the resulting shot will always stay along the ground, giving you the player more agency over how you score. The same mechanic applies to headers,where you can now direct them down into the ground. The passing game has also been improved. The R1 button acts as a modifier, allowing you the ability to hit driven passes across the ground with more power, a low bouncing lob pass, and a through ball into the space in front of the recipient. When playing as the goalkeeper, holding R1 will cause the player’s throws to maintain a lower trajectory, making it travel quicker, but easier to get intercepted by the opposing team. These additions might not sound like much when typed out, but they become super useful tools for differentiating the way your team moves the ball. Passing lanes that weren’t available before are now an additional vein of possibility. Penalties also receive an update; moving the right stick also moves your virtual avatar, opening different angles for the player to take advantage of.

The drawbacks to the action are slim. Defensive midfielders still drift too far forward for my liking, and strikers have a strange tendency to recede into midfield positions, even when not given the instruction to play like a false 9 (another neat addition this year). The free kick system also sees an update similar to the penalties, but this is the least polished gameplay tweak by far. The right stick also changes the positioning of the free kick taker, but the different ways you can strike the ball are strangely nowhere to be seen in the actual game. Corner kicks now have a small reticule to give you more control over the placement of the ball, but moving the reticule is so spastic that it became not worth messing with too much. But none of these deficiencies are so intrusive that they can be considered a real demerit. Playing FIFA 17 is supremely enjoyable. But there is still a crucial element of the game that leaves me wanting more.

When it comes to sports games, I predominantly spend most of my time with them going through the career mode. I’ve watched sports for basically my entire life (my earliest memory is my family freaking out as Michael Jordan won his last final championship over the Utah Jazz in 1998. Their ecstatic yelps made me cry. I was four.) As a scrawny, unathletic dude who really likes the taste of Cheetos, actually playing sports was never a real possibility. Recreating the skills and maneuvers of my favorite players is the closest I'll get to ever feeling like a star athlete. But career modes dig deeper than that. Here you have the ability to build something, to be the sole architect of any of the hundreds of clubs you choose to lead. Liverpool, the team I follow the closest, has an inarguable status as one of the most storied institutions in the sport, but that stature was largely built during an era I had no place in. Their last league title was won in 1990, three years before my birth, and recent years have included a bankruptcy scare and numerous false dawns that only lead to searing disappointment. Career mode is the only place where my beloved reds don’t screw it up as often, live up to their potential, and invent their own glory days (This year might be different, though!).

The single player is rarely the focus of Electronic Arts' attention, but it’s the section of the game that matters most to me. That’s why is such a shame that FIFA 17 offers no substantial steps forward in this instance. For intent and purposes, It’s the same mode from FIFA 16 with a darker color scheme and the ineffectual avatars of Premier League managers in the dugout. The AI-controlled teams still exclusively use one formation and tactical setup, regardless of form or what players are available. The training system is identical to last year’s model. The transfer logic is still very perplexing (In one playthrough, Manchester United had Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Antoine Griezmann, Romelu Lukaku, and Marcus Rashford at the same time. Why?). The only addition to the party is the concept of Total Board Management, where the faceless higher-ups at your chosen club define what a successful regime would look like through a number of objectives. These objectives, combined with your match results, feed into an overall manager rating that you obviously want to keep as high as possible. It’s a neat idea, but the execution leaves it feeling flat. Some of the challenges, especially those surrounding playing and developing players from your youth academy, are a nice touch, but most of the financial goals are gamified into basic useless meters you watch go up. The game gives you no direction or feedback for these goals, so there’s no way to live it up to these goals aside from doing the thing you’re already trying to do in sports games: win a lot.

Overall, Career mode has the feel of the first draft of something better. There are good ideas that haven’t received the necessary iteration to make them substantially better. Adding the ability to improve a player’s work rate or add new positions to players to improve their versatility would go a long way to making the training feature great. You have the ability to create team sheets that provide quick access to different formations and line-ups. Why not allow the AI to be able to use those lineups in career mode? The Pro Evolution Soccer series provides a much bigger array of tools that can make players and teams feel more unique. NBA 2K17 does a similar job through an easily-viewable and expansive list of tendencies and traits that give the players on the court some semblance of a personality. I realize game development is often frustratingly circuitous, and making a game that has to come out in September every year requires one to prioritize, but the career mode hasn’t been a priority for a while now, and it’s starting to show. Other sports games provide an example for how doable this level of improvement is.

It would be churlish to not mention that the FIFA 17 delivers a new mode completely centered around one person. The Journey follows Alex Hunter, a prodigious talent from the tough streets of south London and grandson to a fictional former legend Jim Hunter, on his journey to becoming England’s next superstar. The characters depicted here are comprised of stereotypes you’ve definitely seen before in other forms of media. The best friend who quickly gets consumed by fame and greed after early success. The deadbeat dad whose presence in your life is waiflike at best. The grizzled veterans who initially give you the tough love act. The story beats are pretty easy to see coming, but they are presented well and complimented nicely by a score from Atticus Ross. There are also enough silly moments that suggest a pleasant lack of self-seriousness from the developer. Harry Kane always signs for your club to provide competition. During the preseason, Marco Reus and James Rodriguez drop in from nowhere to compliment Alex Hunter, who is merely a youth team player in a league they don’t play in, for a team they’ll won’t play again, who literally just played his first minutes in the first team. It’s a Hollywood version of reality, not reality itself.

The Journey isn’t perfect - The story only lasts a season and I found myself playing in defensive midfield strangely often -, but it’s an interesting mode that I hope EA Canada continues to spend resources on in the future. It also serves as a reminder that this developer has the capacity to develop creative ideas that add to the game’s repertoire. FIFA 17 is a step forward in numerous ways, except for the one feature that matters most to me. I feel left out.