FIFA Street 2

Football in an urban setting, a recipe for success?

Here’s how to complete 60 percent of FIFA Street 2’s Rule The Street mode – its main single player campaign in which you play in a variety of increasingly repetitive matches to boost your squad skills and win players and prizes:

1. Get possession of the ball
2. Start performing keepie-uppies. The opposing team are so dazzled by your ball control skills that they literally stop in front of you, allowing you a short time to pull off a few tricks before they decide to launch into a tackle.
3. Do this a few times, passing the ball between team-mates to ensure you don’t get tackled, until you’ve filled up your Gamebreaker meter.
4. Congratulations! A glowing circle has now appeared in the centre of the pitch. Head towards it and Gamebreaker mode begins.
5. Now dribble past all three of the opposition. One by one they’ll become so humiliated that they’ll sit down in shame. You now have enough power to score a match-winning goal. Simply push the score button and you’ve, yes, won the match.
6. No, it doesn’t matter if you’re 4-0 down. You’ve won the match.

Thus I ploughed my way through over half the game. Like any cynical reviewer of football games, I came in looking for that magical sweet spot – the point on the pitch where lesser games allow you to inexplicably score under any circumstances. Little did I realise that EA would hand such an option to us on a plate.

It doesn’t always work, admittedly – we’ll get to why soon – but it does more often than not, meaning you’re guaranteed to sail through a number of unnecessary matches before it gets challenging. I guess you’d be pretty hacked off realising 60% of your purchase was made redundant by this tactic. As for me, I was almost annoyed when the difficulty rose and they started tackling early. It meant I’d actually have to put some skill into winning matches which, by now, had lost something of their entertainment value.

Given the lack of innovation, forgive me if this review covers a little too much of the ground of our original review. As with any EA sequel, the gaming magpies will instead be drawn to the overall shiny presentation that glosses the follow-up.

Slick and polished, it has all the intentions of looking like an urban sportswear Nike ad, and plays like one as well with, a vague globo-Latin-American theme running throughout both visuals and music. Speaking of music, gone is the irritating DJ that ruined the first game for many. In his place comes three different platter-players: Radio 1’s Zane ‘The Indie Tim Westwood’ Lowe (slightly less irritating) fronting indy / hiphop hybrid station Live FM, Grooverider (slightly less irritating than Lowe) with the drum ’n bass / urban Rider Radio, and DJ Marky (speaks Spanish but probably irritating) on Radio Bongo with whatever brassy / dancy number is left.

As you can tell it’s all very eclectic, though not necessarily more suitable than throwing a handful of currently marketable tunes in the blender and coming up trumps enough times to make it interesting – Flaming Lips and Boy Kill Boy’s tracks to name two; indicative of the game’s focus on the top-layer as opposed to the sediment underneath. Thank God the music is customisable, anyway, because if I had to listen to Art Brut’s novelty arthouse single ‘Formed A Band’ one more time, I wouldn’t have a TV left to review this game.

At the time of writing this review, FS2 was spending a couple of weeks at the top of the chart. Ignoring the FIFA name for a minute, you have to wonder why. Maybe it’s simply that people are looking for an arcade-style football game that doesn’t require the intelligent commitment of Pro Evo (that sounds like a bad thing when it shouldn’t). But EA seems more concerned with promoting the ‘cool’ buzzword rather than ‘fun’. If you want that, you’re better off buying Mario Smash Football or Sega Soccer Slam, or even waiting for Sensible Soccer’s re-emergence, which hopefully promises the best of both worlds.

FS2’s more like the teenage kid who’s grown out of all that silliness but still makes mistakes underneath that veneer of cool. For instance, why can’t you check your squad’s stats when a player threatens to walk and you want to find out if you still need him or not? (Answer: because you’d be hard pushed to distinguish between players beyond a visual level). Why are the viewing angles never ‘just right’? Why no option to set up your own tournament? Single matches are fine, but if you want to set up your own fantasy four-a-side world cup, you’re going to have to go through this each time. Otherwise you’re relegated to the pre-set single player tournaments unlocked in Rule The Street that force you to play by their rules.

These matches are a mix of scoring five goals to win, or knocking the ball underneath your opponents’ legs five times to win, or scoring 5000 points to win give or take a few goals / points. It all gets very dull after a while. Once you’ve spent the first half of the game instantly winning there’s no reason why it wouldn’t start to drag. In fact, given the lack of fireworks accompanying tricks, the matches that restrict you from Gamebreakers and actually force you to score straightforward goals are probably most enjoyable. These actually encourage you to use the pitch skills you should have picked up by now.

Tricks are easy to pull off by holding a shoulder button and pushing a direction on the right stick. And while a relatively more elaborate shot scores more points equating to more skill bills (cash) one dribble is pretty much the same as another.

Defending is perhaps more frustrating and the reason why the game gets tougher later on. Again you use the right stick to block a trick according to the way it’s played, yet I found it impossible to anticipate which way an opponent would move in order to tackle. Randomly moving the stick about hoping for a lucky break was the order of the day, made doubly frustrating by the fact that control is wrested from you for a few seconds as your player stands there dazed or falls flat on his arse after a feat of supposed deft manoeuvring.

I felt it was best just to stick to the straightforward sliding tackle or shoulder barge, given that there’s no referee to oppose a rough tackle.

If you’re willing to indulge in a multiplayer game or allow the fact that it’ll get challenging later on it can be enjoyable. As ever with EA Big / Sports it never falls below the level of playable despite its lack of other features. However, a better game is lost inside the presentation and ultimately fails to exploit the fun and potential of faster-paced matches, especially in the case of a sequel. When a game offers to let you spend your earnings on a new t-shirt and pair of shoes as a reward you know something’s missing.

This review comes courtesy of our friends at Boomtown.net .