Version needed: 1.50
Players: 1-2
Wi-Fi Compatible: Ad Hoc
It was inevitable that the FIFA football series would find its way onto the PSP at some point and although the UK version of FIFA Football is still to be announced, I’ve managed to get hold of a copy of the American version, FIFA Soccer, to review. FIFA Soccer is the second football game to be released on the PSP, after World Tour Soccer, and makes a good impression with over 350 certified leagues and teams from all over the world, and professional commentary by John Motson and Ally McCoist.
FIFA Soccer keeps in with the previous console and PC versions of the series by including the extra features, such as transferring players, create a player and team management, which are available in the other FIFA games. These translate onto the PSP very well; it’s easy to manage your team and make substitutions in your starting line-up. And creating new players is very simple: there are a lot of different changes you can make to a player’s face, and you can easily customise the attributes to give your new player a great skill level but there doesn’t seem to be any limit to this, so you could easily create an unbeatable squad with the maximum stats on every player.
It’s very easy to get the hang of. The menus are really simple so you can set up a friendly match, tournament or begin a season without any effort, but it’s a little annoying having to wait a while for the game to load every time you make a selection. In the first few dozen games you play, you’ll gain a lot of points just for playing a rival team, scoring hat trick or just for using different modes for the first time. With these points you can go to the FIFA store in My FIFA Soccer and unlock items like a couple of new tracks, new uniforms and the ability to play at night in certain stadiums in challenge mode.
The loading times often get in the way of the otherwise-smooth gameplay. They’re bearable when you’re going through menus where they take a few seconds to load the next one, but instead of it being a matter of seconds to navigate though the menus, it ends up taking a few minutes to do something as simple as setting up a friendly match. This also happens during matches where the game will freeze for a moment just before the ball goes off the pitch while it loads a scene showing player’s frustration when they’ve missed a chance at scoring.
Pulling off first-touch and freestyle moves proves to be one of the most difficult things to do in FIFA Soccer. To do this you need to use the directional buttons directly after passing to another teammate to perform the move then quickly take control of the player that you passed to with the analogue stick. This can be extremely tricky: it’s not easy to switch from one set of controls to another and back again with one hand while performing other tasks in the other within a few moments, but because of the lack of a right analogue stick on the PSP, this cannot be helped. Apart from that, EA have done well with the handling; the controls are very responsive and although the analogue stick’s not quite as reactive on the PSP as a PS2 controller, they’ve managed to use it to great effect.
As with other EA games for PSP, FIFA Soccer includes EA Pocket Trax, which consists of about 35 songs from Air, Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Elkland, Faithless, Flogging Molly, Franz Ferdinand, Head Automatica, Scissor Sisters, The Bravery, The Libertines, The Streets, and many other artists. A couple of these tracks also come with the music video, which is a nice little feature because you get to see some of these bands that you may not have heard of until now. The background music and accurate commentary help to give the game a very authentic feel, but the supporters in the stands lets it down a little. There’s no build-up when a player might be about to score, and if they do score, it sometimes takes the crowd a while to realise it. This, of course, is not a major issue, but the lack of movement from them does make you wonder why they’re even there.
It is still a little unsure as to whether this game will see a UK release but if the unthinkable happens and that date is never announced then it is definitely worth getting hold of an import copy. It’s an excellent game; great for whether you’re playing for hours at home or when you’re on the go. And although there are some things that you can tell were a little rushed, the majority of FIFA Soccer is superb and almost as good as the console versions. So if you’re waiting for FIFA 2006 then maybe you should get this first to familiarise yourself with the gameplay and controls of the handheld version of the series.
Overall: 74% Posted on 10/10/06 by Steph 
Linear Mode
