If like me, you simply can not wait for the real action to begin, it does offer some nicotine-esque thrills.
That being said, I found my time with this incarnation of the beautiful game rather disappointing. What makes this fact even more poignant, is that for a few slight and arguably rather basic changes, this game could have been fantastic.
First I would like to point out the positives and there are more than a few. The first and one which was never in doubt, is the fully licensed tournament, players and teams. Add to this license, the fantastic player models and stadium details, and your left with a fantastic representation of the tournament.
The graphics in this game are great for the most part. The player models all look great and the top 100 players all have there own lifelike animations to really mark them out on the football field. The stadiums all look as you would expect, with some great crowd animations, which really bring the carnival atmosphere of the tournament to the forefront.
The game also boasts a slick menu system, which you would expect from the juggernaut that is EA Sports. The menu's are all really slick and stylish, whilst remaining easy to navigate and useful.
A new mode which has been added to the usual array of exhibition, tournaments and penalty shootouts, is the Global Challenge. This mode puts you into various situations from World Cups past, with a set of objectives to either match the actual outcome or even better it for bonus points. The points earned from this mode and the other various games can be spent in the EA Store, which contains Classic Players, Kits, Footballs, Teams and other apparel. This is nice bonus to the game and gives the player something to achieve, especially from a single player perspective.
There have been a few tweaks to the A.I. in the game, which further goes to improve the gameplay experience, most notably the shooting mechanics and the penalty shoot-out mode have been worked on. Both of these work well and are a definate step forward for the series.
Now onto the bad points and these are in equal quantity to the good points noted above.
First off......the graphics. The fantastic work on the players and stadiums is let down, by what I will refer to in this review as 'Shaky Cam' (Trademark that one EA). The camera seems to move erratically and jerks around when the passing and pace of the game picks up. This is frustrating, but this frustation increases tenfold as you turn the difficulty up. Trying to come back from a goal down or put together a decent passing rhythm becomes tedious at best and this really lets down some of the hard work put in by the designers in other areas.
Other problems arise from the A.I. in this game also. Most notable is the fact that your players seem to have a life of their own, unfortunately, this is not an intelligent life. Your players will often get in the way of passes you try to play, resulting in loss of possesion and the break down of the offense. Your players offer no support in defence and have a tendency to stand around and miss runs by the opposition. These problems are again further highlighted as the difficulty is cranked up. If you are a player of PES / WE, then you will find these problems really annoying.
As seems to be the trend with Fifa games, the goalkeepers are a strange bunch. They make the really difficult saves look easy and the really easy saves look difficult. After around 30 mins play time, most adequately skilled players will have worked out how to beat the keeper nearly everytime (reduce that time by 80% if you have ever played a Fifa game before in the last 5 years).
This leads onto the next problem with the game. What seems to be a simple lack of effort on the developers part, to fix the problems with the gameplay, which have been widely reported from previous games in the franchise. The problems surrounding the A.I. in this game, have all been evident before in previous Fifa games and it seems that there has been no attempt what-so-ever to rectify any of these for this release. EA may say that due to the timing of the tournament, they didn't have enough time to overhaul the gameplay and still get the game released on time. Well more to the point why wasn't all of this content simply added to the Fifa game released little over 6 months ago? Dollar signs in the eyes would be the obvious conclusion to this question. Whilst the point scoring system in the game, goes somewhat to making you want to play the game more and maybe complete the tournament with numerous teams, when compared to the monstrous amount of content found in Fifa 06, it is hard to recommend this purchase.
All of this leaves an uneasy distaste in the mouth, when you have just spent another £40 on a game, which isn't really any different from another game you purchased before xmas. The only really noticeable difference being the gulf in content offered by the various titles.
This is an obvious cash-in to mark the upcoming main event, whilst this doesn't necessarily make this a bad game, it simply makes it difficult to recommend over it's predecessor. If like me, you simply can not wait for the real action to begin, it does offer some nicotine-esque thrills. For simple football fans, I'd sit it out and wait for Fifa 07 and Pro Evolution Soccer 6.