FIFA 21
Football game FIFA has some difficulty in bringing sufficient innovation year after year. One year innovations in the series turn out better than the next and FIFA 21 is unfortunately on the less strong side of the spectrum. Every part of the game has new parts and some of them are definitely working out positively, but none of them change the game enough to feel really new. In gameplay, the most noticeable changes – the faster speed and the higher number of goals – aren’t positive changes either. That makes FIFA 21 not a bad game, but a game of which, if you already have FIFA 20, you have to ask yourself whether it is worth your money. Visually, little changes, Volta remains quite funny but never really grabs the full attention, in Ultimate Team you largely do exactly the same as previous years and the innovations in the Career Mode are good, but also do not provide a completely different game experience. FIFA 20 sparked a strong call for more change and that will not exactly decrease after FIFA 21.
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Final verdict
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Anyone who watches football on their television this fall will see largely empty stands. Small groups of fans are allowed in some places, but it was. Anyone who wants to see the atmosphere along football pitches will have to look up old images or seek refuge in games. If you want to recreate football as realistically as possible, you should take the audience away, but we are still happy that in FIFA 21 we just see full stands and cannot find a trace of COVID-19. What we do find: new features for Ultimate Team and Volta, a – finally – renewed career mode and some innovations in the gameplay. Above all, the hope is that it will provide enough steps forward from FIFA 20, because if there is one habit EA Sports needs to break with, it is that it has shown little development in its football game series in recent years.
Every new FIFA is of course always an update in the field of transfers and the like. That is good, but not enough. You want more news for your sixty euros. Konami, EA Sports’ much smaller competitor, has made a different choice with PES 2021. Instead of releasing a whole new game, the Japanese company has released a seasonal update. Whether you think thirty euros for just a data update is a lot or a little, you can decide for yourself, but it is in any case a statement. Konami focuses on the new possibilities that the new generation of consoles brings and saw itself unable to release a game that would be worthwhile this year. The expected criticism: the same may also apply to FIFA, but EA does choose to bring a completely new game to the market.
That new game undeniably contains a nice list of new elements. What you can do with your Ultimate Team and your Volta Team and how you can develop those teams in status and decoration is largely new. The only question is how important the average FIFA player considers these changes. Of course there will be players who will enjoy the street and indoor football matches in the Volta game mode introduced last year for a long time. And of course, some of the innovations in Ultimate Team are quite fun and many will find the new systems in career mode entertaining. But it’s about the football. It’s about what FIFA 21 shows when you play matches. Last year we wrote that the patterns in the gameplay had hardly changed. There were new systems, new bells and whistles, but the way we played the game didn’t change enough. As a result, anyone who switched seamlessly from FIFA 19 to FIFA 20 at times barely had the feeling that they were playing a new game. FIFA 21 must do that really better.
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