“EA SPORTS FC™ 24 welcomes you to The World’s Game: the most true-to-football experience ever with HyperMotionV, PlayStyles optimised by Opta, and an enhanced Frostbite™ Engine.”
This is the grandiose description of FC 24 on Steam, of a game that charges players the same 100 AUD every year, to play relatively the same game every year.
FC 24 is the 31st instalment of the football simulation series by Electronic Arts, released on 29 September 2023.
Gameplay
The game still offers frustrating gameplay, even worse than its last instalment. One of the few positive aspects of FIFA 23 was its fluid, free-flowing gameplay, which this game horrendously butchered. Players now feel sluggish even with high pace stats. Dribbling requires intense hair-pulling concentration in micromanaging dribbling to avoid the stampede of pushing, shirt-pulling, and the not-so-occasional bad touches. Tackling is extremely easy except for when it’s convenient for the opponent to equalise after you have peppered them with 30 shots. Shooting is very easy as well. The number of times your shots hitting the post and crossbar is abnormally high, however. This puts players at a tough spot where they cannot play the way they want, and must adapt to playing a rigid, formulaic playstyle, where clever passing play is not effective, and constant spamming of the same flair skill is going to win you most games. There is no diverse playstyle, except for those sadists who drag all their players back to the front of their goalframe just to defend.
Additionally, there is a myth of scripting or momentum shifting in matches, where a player is having the upper hand on another player, registering 30 shots on goal but only scoring 1. Then in the last few minutes, the other player gets a lucky deflection of the ball, conveniently landing the ball straight into their footballer’s feet, allowing them to equalise or even win. The player who was dominating is left extremely frustrated, where the dominated player gets away with at least a draw.
These inconveniences happen many of times in the real-world game as well. However, they do not happen in such a frequency. This may be due to the careless development of the game, or the intentional alteration of the game that leaves players slightly dissatisfied for them to continue playing the game.
Game-modes
There are many game-modes in this game, but the two prominent ones are Ultimate Team, and Career Mode.
Ultimate Team is where you can build and manage your favourite squad of players and use them in PvP matches or in singleplayer. You can get any player to play with any player… but most of them won’t win you anything. This game-mode has always been EA’s way to milk the cash cow. It incentivises players to get the best of footballers for exorbitant amounts of in-game currency. You can get an average team quickly, but to get a slightly better than average team, you need to spend more time gaming than sleeping. There is also another option, microtransactions. This is when you spend money on the game’s random loot boxes. This just so happens to make the progression in the game thousands of times faster. With a snap of a finger, you can get the best of the best, the Ronaldos, the Peles, the Guillts, without breaking a sweat. This not only makes the game extremely unfair, but it also encourages people to start gambling on the game’s loot boxes, or “packs” as EA calls them.
Career Mode is where you can become a football coach or player. In this mode, you can manage squads, buy players, win trophies just like a coach in the real world. You can also become a player and go through training, playing matches, go shopping (for some reason). This is a very neglected part of the game, because it is the part of the game that makes no money. But this is the most entertaining mode for me, even with its bugs and errors. The board of director’s objectives are extremely unreasonable, and that sometimes leads to the sacking of you in-game. “I must fire you because you didn’t sign 4 Lithuanian youth players, even though you’ve won the domestic triple, raised 100,000 dollars for cancer research, and saved my son from death.” Obviously, this is a greatly exaggerated way of portraying these objectives, but the point still stands. The importance of these objectives is greatly skewed. They will sack you if you don’t complete a minute objective but will not fire you if you massively underachieved in the football league.
Graphics
This is one of the few things FC 24 does well. The player faces look very realistic with dynamic lighting and animation. However, there are occasional graphic glitches and errors which can make the game frustrating. Additionally, the power shot animation looks very unrealistic compared to real life shooting, and the player face scans are rarely updated.
Conclusion
FIFA, now FC 24, has always had a soft spot in my heart. The game contains lots of my childhood nostalgia. However, the game has not improved in many years, with most of EA’s attention going to Ultimate Team whilst leaving Career mode to rot.
FC 24 gets a 4/10 – a mediocre score for a frustratingly mediocre game.
