This is the real football experience. It has goods, bads and plenty of fun.
Let me explain what I understand by real football experience: when I play the game I feel like being a real player involved in a real match. I played all the FIFA series since FIFA 98 up to FIFA 2007 and this feeling is the strongest with this game (FIFA 2001 was very good too). Some ppls like to call it "immersive". When you'll go to FIFA 2007 you'll have the feeling of really playing a computer game and nothing more... there is nothing "immersive", unfortunately. FIFA 06 introduces some finer ball control possibilities than the previous versions but it's still far behind the possibilities of Pro Evolution Soccer (or Winning Eleven) series, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I like the power of PES but the number of key combinations to learn and use is just too big for me so I stick to FIFA because it's simpler and easier.
If you are new to FIFA series I advise you to keep the difficulty level to at most semi-pro and start with a 5 star team. It will be easier to learn and to discover the beauty of the game.
The teams are well balanced and you'll manage to score from long shots even without the "ultimate strikers" like Thiery Henry or Ronaldinho. Once you'll get used to the game, you'll manage to win pretty often with a 2-3 star team against a 5 star team. This wasn't really the case with the previous releases of the game.
The biggest, let's say lack and not problem of the game is that while you are defending, it's very difficult to manually select a player in the front of the attacker player (unless they are really close) so you'll almost always select players behind the attacker (then you'll have to follow the attacker player and increase fatigue while a defender in the front of the attacker can easily slow him down and get faster the ball than the followers).
Another lack of the game is that a computer controlled team will hardly make any substitutions which is not the case in real games. I heard there are non official workarounds for it but I never tried them.
Internet playing is quite slow and pretty much a game of anticipation :-( (I saw players doing anticipating slidings all the game which won a lot of balls... without the internet latency this wouldn't be possible so online playing is completely different from the offline one... no wonder we have sayings like "Gaming experience may change during online play" :-P).
One thing I would appreciate a lot at this game is the possibility to record an entire game. One can save short moments of the game which is really great for recording amazing goals or misses but not an entire game.
Comments in the game is something I love. The clishes amuses me a lot, sometimes I play the game only to listen to them.
The music in the game is also cool. With every new version of FIFA series I had the impression that the previous version's music was better but once I get used to it I think is quite the opposite. I'm evolving too... :-)
With all these lacks, I have great time playing it and recording beautiful goals almost every day.