Career mode essentially unusable
What ruins this game is the number of basic faults and glitches it suffers from. The freezes encountered in the career mode are well documented - the career mode will often freeze at the end of the first season. In other cases, the career mode will simply refuse to progress past a certain date, and there's nothing you can do to fix it. This is incredibly frustrating when you've spent time slowly building a team you love. Other career mode problems include returning loan players (who sometimes just disappear) and player contracts that reset to "-2 years remaining" if you try to extend them, dooming the player to release at the end of the season.
There are other problems outside the career mode, too. When you bring on substitute players, the game often fails to render them, and so they are completely invisible on the pitch. Trying to guess where your invisible player is (and then scoring with him when you guess right) is a laugh the first time it happens, but it quickly gets tiresome.
Overall, this game feels like what I hate most in this industry - a gamma test. Whether it's a game, a car or a toaster, I hate it when I buy a product that feels like it hasn't been tested by the designer at all. That's exactly what this game feels like. It's obvious that EA were in a rush to release FIFA on time this year, and weren't bothered about releasing a broken, untested game to a fanbase they knew would go out and spill £40 a time for before checking reviews first. It's disgusting market exploitation from EA really, and this is the last time I'm letting it happen to me. I'm not buying this football game any more.