FIFA 08

Oct 17, 2007

Well, we must have misinterpreted the early signs for this one, because despite being promoted by a Mii-style Ronaldinho and featuring cartoony backgrounds and crazy new controls, it’s actually very much a traditional FIFA game. Quite a dated one, at that.

If you stay away from the brightly coloured Party menu option then this is essentially a PS2-era soccer game, with the default camera angle changed to a vertically scrolling view to accommodate some counter-intuitive motion controls.

Most of the standard commands, such as crossing, shooting, passing and tackling, have been re-mapped to up/down/left/right movements of the remote. To do a hard shot, you flick the remote up while running with the ball. To do a soft shot, you flick it down. Or is it the other way round? We forget.

It’s relatively simple to master the basics. The problems arise when you want to do anything else. To send a long pass up the field, you hold a button and flick the remote. To send a chipped pass, you hold another button. To do a chipped shot, you hold something else. To do a cross, you hold two buttons. To add spin, you tilt the Nunchuk after kicking the ball. There are as many commands as in any other FIFA game but they’re all shoe-horned into four remote directions and four modifier buttons, and despite having plenty of experience of previous FIFA games and Wii gesture commands, we had a hard time getting this to do what we wanted.