FIFA 17: A Journey. Not THE Journey
I didn’t pre-order it. Or go to a midnight opening, stay up all night and chuck a sickie so I could spend the day on the sofa. I’m not quite there yet. I’d like to make that clear before launching into this piece; a gesture towards documenting my first evening with FIFA 17.
AKA the most anticipated game in the average football fan’s calendar.
Or is it? Initial reviews and anecdotal evidence suggest we’re getting a little worn out with the franchise, despite EA’s attempts to broaden gameplay in recent years with Ultimate Team, the introduction of women’s football and emotional intelligence. For while all these things — plus the opportunity to potter about in Skills Training and/or gawp at the beautiful stadia and player likenesses — have offered a degree of novelty to the experience, the meat of the game has remained largely the same. Whether you play Career, FUT or a league season, you are required to play hour after hour of matches, that aside from the odd minor tweak, have remained roughly the same since 2015’s edition.
To be fair to EA, they’ve done their best to inject some liveliness into the franchise for 2017, on the surface at least. Marco Reus on the cover and the loading screens may seem like an unimportant detail, but when you consider that Lionel Messi’s face is the one you’ve been staring at since FIFA 13, it’s surprisingly refreshing to see someone else. Anyone else. The menus have also been given a spruce but the options remain largely the same.
In order to cover as much ground as possible for this review, I played the fixture offered as standard during the loading procedure, a tantalising FA Cup Final between Manchester United & Chelsea which gave me my first taste of in-play action.
The tweaks to the engine were evident from the off. Having spent far too many hours playing the last incarnation of the game, my reactions are tuned to button mashing that and initially every move I made resembled that of Pepe after a day drinking Red Bull. It’s going to take some time for the nuances of controlling players to become muscle memory and I’m using that rationalisation to comfort myself after an horrific performance which resulted in two red cards, wild Sergio Ramos-esque shots at the moon and game statistics cobbled together from a Tim Sherwood press conference.
Happily, all that counts for nothing and once the installation and inevitable update were complete, I was able to embark on The Journey.
This is the biggest addition to FIFA gameplay for some time and has quite obviously been heavily trailed to draw people who, like me, enjoy Career mode and shiny things. And aside from the opening credit sequence featuring a Kasabian track that confirms (to me at least) that they’ve lost their way since Fire, it’s kind of fun.
The narrative — a young man embarking on a career in the big leagues in order to emulate his grandfather — is immersive and eminently watchable, if a little cliched at times. There’s a cocky guy with a Range Rover, a best mate on a similar career trajectory and when you see the household names passing your character in corridors, there is a frisson of excitement. We’re all Alex Hunter in one way or another or we wouldn’t be buying this game year after year.
There are a few irritations that could use ironing out through updates. How to exit The Journey and return to the main screen isn’t immediately obvious and I spent a fair bit of time scrolling to menus piddling about with camera angles to make my contribution to Alex’s development a little more straightforward. It can be a little slow going if you’ve been through trials or have been a heavy user of previous FIFA games, but I’m assured by other people that it perks up once you’ve put a few hours in.
Without that luxury, I’m in no position to offer a definitive conclusion about FIFA 17. That said, I can’t help but feel that once the novelty of exploration has worn off, Alex Hunter has become hardened pro and I’m dragging Cheltenham Town through the leagues towards an unlikely Champions League victory, there isn’t enough depth to make me feel like my life is anything more than a wet and windy evening in Stoke.
An experience which, ironically, would have been easier on my bank account.
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