FIFA 2005 on the pitch is a fantastic game, so it is a shame the rest of the game is a bit of a let down
User Rating: 7 | FIFA Soccer 2005 PC
Lets start with the good, almost every team you’d ever wish to play are here, with accurate team statistics, and player stats and likenesses. This is a real assist to the game, and adds a lot to the feeling of realism of the title. On the pitch, the game is really good fun, players react the way they should, goals don’t feel cheap, and are rewarding, and the AI is very competent on the higher settings, which makes for some challenging games. If one complaint could be made (and in fairness there aren’t that many) the free kicks are extremely easy to score from, at least in my experience. Doing the same thing each time will almost always result in a goal, which detracts from the realism the game aims for. All in all, once you start playing matches, the experience is very rewarding. However, to get to the match, it’s immediately obvious the game lacks polish. The menus are clunky, and setting up a custom tournament is incredibly tedious, having to first select the league by continually clicking left or right, hit return to confirm, and start the process again for as many as 32 teams. Why can’t I pick from a list, and save myself 10 minutes? Picking a team is also needlessly clunky. Double click one player, and then click on the player you want to replace them with, which quite often takes a few goes, since it doesn’t always accept that you’ve clicked. Why can’t I drag and drop players? All these frustrating things could easily be remedied, and make for an all together better experience. These all seem fairly minor issues, and most will probably be able to ignore them, but for me, they really served as a sticking point. The music in the game is all licensed, so the quality is generally good. Although the vast majority of the music wasn’t to my tastes, so I was thankful for the option to remove tracks, which I ended up doing to all of them because of another little issue… The Jukebox will often get in your way whilst in the already clumsy menu. If I want to go back, I either have to wait 5 seconds for the jukebox to minimise, or hit F5 and quickly make a run for the back button before it pops up again. Needless to say, this is annoying. The rest of the sounds in the game, from sound chanting, to commentary is all very good, although as in most sports game, this can get repetitive pretty quickly. The game comes with a wide variety of pre set up tournaments to get stuck into, although I’m baffled at the exclusion of European/International tournaments. All the tournaments are domestic based. The game ships with every major league in the world, and yet doesn’t come with tournaments to exploit this strength. Normally this wouldn’t be much of an issue, but the poor custom tournament segment is a less than ideal way to remedy the problem. I didn’t really get stuck into the online portion of the game, but from what I did play it was easy to find games, and get playing. Fifa 2005 also comes with its fair share of bugs, at least with me. Clicking away selecting teams will quite often result in a crash to desktop, and the game occasionally will crash to the desktop in game as well. I had to roll back some drivers on my graphics card to get the game to display correctly, and an issue with the patching system, prevented me form playing online until I found information on how to remedy the problem. In all, FIFA 2005 is a decent game, but ultimately disappointing. The lack of effort with the menu design, and tournaments let down the actual game play, which is very good.
