UEFA EURO 2004

EURO 2004 saves us from the end-of-season blues, it's off to Portugal we go for high quality international football action.

The graphics on the whole are very good, EURO 2004 is easily the best-looking football game around, but the same could be said for FIFA for quite a while. The stadiums and players are rendered in glorious detail with the player faces being almost photographic quality yet without the rubbish look of having photos spread across faces as some games have tried. Some of the stands can seem a little dark, while the pitch in some situations is way too bright - the crowd looks pretty dreadful too. Player animation is excellent and there's no lag when moving between different animations. I have heard reports of some slowdown in the Xbox version (the version tested) but I did not witness this myself during extensive play.

However there is a horrendous bug in the Xbox widescreen display that really shouldn't have got past any competent testers. Sometimes after accessing the in-game menu the image will return to 4:3 from the Widescreen setting. What makes this unusual is that all the onscreen action returns to 4:3 while all the graphic overlays such as the free kick icons and scoreboards remain in widescreen mode. The only thing to do when faced with this, is finish the match, save the progress then reboot the machine. It's amazing that a publisher would let a console game get out of the door with such an obvious bug. But at least I can report it only occurred a couple of times during play so far.

You know what you're getting with FIFA sound. The crowd is great with chants recorded for each of the teams. Sadly there's no Great Escape music from the England fans but that is likely to be a licensing issue. Commentary comes courtesy of John Motson and Ally McCoist. A lot of the phrases return from FIFA 2004, but there's lost of new EURO 2004 specific commentary and some more discussion moments at the beginning of games. Games still end on a muted note though and EA needs to work on the way things are brought to a close.

EURO 2004 doesn't get the highest score due to a few problems, most notably the widescreen bug and some rather shoddy menu presentation. The action on the pitch remains as good as ever but the limited scope of the 51 European teams means this is not a game that will keep a player occupied for a long time in the way that the FIFA series does. That being said, EURO 2004 plays a mean and deep game of football and gamers looking for a fix to tide them over the summer will find this is one of the best games of its type around.