When you have a successful franchise in the form of FIFA, it seems a bit silly to take on a Euro game and try to make it not like a FIFA game as much as possible to completely differentiate from each other.
Although, this was the year before FIFA really started to take the lead over Pro Evolution Soccer (yes, this is a retrospective review due to the original getting lost) and therefore any technical detail such as the gaming engine and the control and movement of players, I suppose you could say, were being played to test the waters.
As for game modes, well Battle of the Nations and Captain Your Country are pretty much the main ones that will take up your time as once you’ve gone through the lengthy intro of BotN, chosen your team and taken them all the way to the top, the performance of your team throughout will affect a daily leaderboard, regardless of whether you played online or off. Since the number of teams are way less than in your typical FIFA game, you’re not exactly stuck for choice and have the choice of playing as whoever you want to to battle your way through and become champions of Europe.
Since this isn’t a FIFA title, Captain Your Country replaces Be A Pro and takes it a bit further. Create a player and have him perform well enough in the qualifying rounds in order to try to make him captain of the team in the finals, it’s obviously easier to do that with a weak team, but that also means there’s a chance you may not even make it to the finals and thus scuppering your chances of earning serious points.
It’s a good-looking game, there’s no doubting that time has been taken to get things rather spinky and is quite a polished game. Obviously not totally perfect and you may suffer a slight minor glitch once in a while and talking of glitches, it must have been through some vigorously intensive testing to come out as well as it has. The controls are fine, no quibbles there, the player should do what you expect him to do when you move and press buttons, there’s nothing more annoying than having a character do something you know is completely the opposite to what you tried to perform.
One of the things it’s kind of difficult to review with football games is the sound, there’s no point in trying to distinguish crowd sounds between games, yeah there might be different chants and a few unique reactions, but since there are similarities to FIFA 08 and the fact people are always going to compare them, it’s understandable that you may recognize something within the game.
Being the Xbox 360 version of the game, it uses the next generation engine which was probably not quite optimised enough to eliminate some of the slowdown that the game suffered at certain points, yet it’s still enjoyable to play.
Despite having enhanced online features, it’s doubtful you’ll get to play any online multiplayer since everyone is playing FIFA xx, but if you can find this for cheap (which you should be able to by now), it might just be worth picking up for a bit of a break.
Sunday, October 6
