FIFA 08 review

Oct 17, 2007

Purists will usually support Winning Eleven, but as Chelsea has proved in the last few years you don’t need to play the prettiest soccer to get results. Sometimes you’ve got to maximize your strengths and hope they compensate for the weaker areas of your game; the FIFA brand is becoming a master of this tactic.

Bynow, everyone knows FIFA boasts enough licensing muscle to pull in hundreds of factually accurate teams, right down to the number of stripes on a pair of socks, as well as making sure every player looks like who they’re supposed to. This is good in itself, but now the trademark razzmatazz is aligned to a fun new single-player mode in the PS3 version called Be a Pro, and an even better one in the PS2 version called Co-op Season. In the latter, up to four players each choose one existing prima donna or create a player from scratch and basically spend an entire season controlling only him during matches.