FIFA 06: Road to the World Cup

At the end of the day Brian, it's a game of two halves…

Yes the whole two halves malarkey, never has it been so true describing a videogame than here. FIFA 06: Road to the World Cup is EA Sports' first football game for the new Microsoft Xbox 360. It's a game that horrifies as much as it delights, one minute it seems the best thing ever, the next the worst game ever released. But how is this possible?

Well if we split things into two, it's easier to see. First, this is not a full FIFA game, it's not the game that you can currently buy on Xbox, Cube, PS2 and PC. Those games are fully featured games with club and international sides. Instead of tarting up the PC game, EA Sports has created an entirely new game for the launch of Xbox 360. It's an admirable goal, if you'll pardon the pun, but also leads to some big problems.

Firstly there's much less content in the game compared to the other versions of FIFA 06. There are no club teams, no Manchester United, no Liverpool, no Chelsea. Instead we have international sides and their struggle to qualify for the World Cup. Now I have to say, once you see the graphics, you'll welcome the approach of creating a new and rather gorgeous game for Xbox 360 rather than porting the PC version over. Yet at the same time, having to create another game means there's been no time to recreate all those club sides.

As you might expect in a FIFA game there are plenty of modes to keep you busy, such as quick games and creating your own leagues and cups. The centrepiece of the game is the Road to the World Cup mode. Here you guide your chosen international side through the two years of qualifying; playing friendly matches and tournaments in addition to the big qualifying matches themselves. There's the choice to play the real life qualifying groups, or shake things up a little for your chosen team.

This does result in quite a varied challenge as you'll have your own highs and lows throughout the season quite apart from the qualifying games. New players to the franchise and those coming over from PES may feel the matches get bogged down into a midfield battle. If you learn the ropes though and make use of the various tactical options on offer you'll find a surprisingly deep and customisable gameplay experience. It's this aspect of the game that most closely resembles the excellent regular versions of FIFA 06.

The presentation is another area where the game disgusts and delights in equal measure. The front of the game is quite interesting as the main menu features a two on one indoor match you can play on the menu or while other matches are loading. Unfortunately the menus are a mess for anyone not running the game on a high-definition television or VGA monitor.

The problem is that the text is very small, the assumption wrongly being that we'll all be playing the game in high-definition. So we have tiny white text over light backgrounds that are very hard to read. It's even more of a problem when playing a match. Camera choices are buried under a couple of sub menus, which is fiddly to change during play.

The actual use of menus in match is good though. The d-pad is used to change tactics or request a quick substitution. These work very well, though it's strange players have to choose a particular defensive or offensive strategy from the list, where in the regular FIFA 06 they could leave the strategy on neutral. Being able to bring on a substitute quickly really works well.