Originally published at: Review | EA Sports FC 24 - XboxEra
If you’re still calling it FIFA, it’s okay—we all are. The branding has marked this football franchise for decades now, coming into play during the 90s when sports games began rising into the market. Electronic Arts’ name change for the series, now known as EA Sports FC, is more than just a name change: it’s a collective revamp for how the series can change in the future. It also retains all its licenses to players, teams, leagues, and more from its FIFA tenure.
So let’s go over EA Sports FC 24 and what it brings to the table for this new generation of football games.
The Offside Watch
I think one of the key components to any sports game is nailing the gameplay. How the game controls, physics, the artificial intelligence, so on and so forth. I’m coming from FIFA 22 on the PlayStation 4 and I can safely say that FC 24 is still a fantastic football game. Players feel good to control and are responsive, there’s animations for just about anything (even trips look natural), the crowds looks great, goalies reach for the moon when blocking—the presentation is simply phenomenal and FC 24 easily has some of the best presentation across the AAA sports game spectrum. You’ll also learn to love Amazon Prime a lot.
Besides style, FC 24’s biggest feature this time around is PlayStyles. These are essentially skills that are appended to a lot of your players in the game and makes them specialists in certain aspects, like my gold Alexandra Popp and how she can do more powerful headers or Antoine Griezmann‘s extremely accurate and stronger curve shots. Planning out your team with this system in mind gives you a much better chance at winning your matches online and offline.
This year’s Ultimate Team (“UT”) also lets you put female characters on the same team as males. FC 24 also has evolutions for certain players with certain overalls that can be eligible for overall increases via objectives that you need to activate. Completing these objectives, such as using that player in four different games at Semi-pro difficulty or getting assists/shots, improves your player’s skills as well. As of right now there are certain caps on who is eligible for Evolutions, but that could potentially change over the course of the game’s life—something to keep an eye on.
For the time I put in (primarily in UT), I felt like FC 24 was a decently balanced game, be it Squad Battle or Rivals. Ultimately (hah!), Ultimate Team continues the tradition of pulling for players via real world microtransactions which always makes me frown. On the bright side, you can trade for players that you want through gameplay-earned coins, so there are ways to earn your way to the top. Just be prepared to grind, but at least you’ll be having fun doing so.
The Minutes
When I played FC 24 I primarily played the UT mode. I dabbled here and there with the Volta and Career mode, but nothing ever quite beats the addictive pacing of UT. And I’ve come to appreciate how smooth the game’s menus are and the new overhaul, the options available for gameplay settings and commentary languages (I would like to see more, like Turkish!), the referee going into first-person so you get their perspective on why they gave a particular card (this isn’t available on last generation consoles), and so on and so forth. Trainer mode also helps players new to the games and does a good job of giving an idea on how to react under certain circumstances.
I have some irks with the AI, particularly the ones on your team. The ‘Defensive Awareness’ stat determines whether or not a friendly player will go for a ball that’s sitting there and oftentimes I would watch as players not in my control not go for free balls that are right in front of them. I promise you that makes for some very frustrating moments, and I find it to be unrealistic—even the worst football players would engage a ball lying out in the open. But I digress.
EA Sports FC 24 continues the legacy of a great football game series. It’s easy to pick up for anyone thanks to a good tutorial system and features addicting modes that you can take online and offline. The game’s gorgeous and runs really well on the Xbox Series X. EA has made sure to entrench its football series even without the FIFA license, so I think you can continue to expect only the best from this series going forward. ∎