Any football fan, unless you support Manchester City, often ponders about the glory years in the past. The times when it was enjoyable to watch your team play and how you wish things were the same in present day. This is how I feel when I play Fifa 15, like when a new football season approaches, there is always some hope and optimism that this season will be better than the last. Whether it's new signings in real life football, or new features in Fifa.
The first and most obvious thing I will note about Fifa 15 is how beautiful the game looks. All of the Premier League stadiums have been brilliantly recreated and look great in game. Also, it's impressive how the pitch deteriorates due to footprints and marks left from slide tackles and it really does make for a more realistic look, rather than the plastic, glossy appearance from previous games. Also, the crowd is noticeably improved, as they react more realistically to chances, bad tackles, bookings and the full time result. Trust me when you lose 4-0 at home, the boos are deafening.
Now this is the part when I have to talk about the game play, and this is where I have to delve into the games problems. First of all, the defensive A.I is still desperately lacking. The game encourages you to defend in a more organised fashion. This is a great idea in theory, but it is impossible to defend with any kind of organisation when the A.I is a poor as it is. From my experience playing the game, in terms of A.I there is literally no improvement from the Xbox 360 version of Fifa 14, bare in mind I play Fifa 15 on the PC, which uses the new Ignite engine. If you play the game on World Class or Legendary, you will notice this, whereas if you play on Professional you probably wont, as the game is very, very easy at that setting.
In terms of features, well I haven't yet played Ultimate Team, but Career Mode is exactly the same as it was in Fifa 14. However this isn't really a criticism, as it was pretty good in Fifa 14.
A.I aside, the game play still feels the same. Despite a new game engine, it still feels clunky, and regardless of which team you are playing as they still seem to lose the ball very easily, funny as it's almost impossible to win the ball back from the opponents especially if you play against a smaller team. Now I can't explain why this is the case, but I honestly find playing against the top teams easier than against the smaller teams. I mentioned earlier about losing 4-0 at home, well do not be surprised if you experience a large amount of home defeats to smaller clubs. Also I must stress, that the goal keeper A.I is absolutely abysmal!
Opposing teams in Fifa 15 will adapt to situations in matches, so if you are winning by a solitary goal, then the CPU will play with a much more attacking mentality and will press you more, which will of course make things more difficult for you. In fact you will often need to change your own mentality to something more defensive and look to play a more counter attack style. Now, this is actually good to see, as it adds a lot of realism and gives the game a nice dynamic feeling. However, teams such as Crystal Palace or Burnley (I mean no disrespect to any of their fans) will suddenly acquire a sudden, unnatural ability to play literally perfect football, and your team will suddenly lose the ability to string together a single pass or shoot on target. Also, it is funny that in these kind of matches, almost all of your shots that are on target will hit the crossbar or the post. Fifa has been using this trick for a while now, which is so disappointing as we all thought that with the extra power of modern PCs and the next gen consoles, E.A would be able to program A.I that is a little more intelligent than this.
So in summary, Fifa 15 is a game that promises so much, which all the stadiums and brilliant graphics, in addition to the enhanced A.I that was supposedly going to be in this game, Fifa 15 just feels like same game as previous titles but prettier. Like real life, as an Aston Villa fan, I was hoping for a better season.