FIFA 20 Review
What is there to say about FIFA 20? Look, it was…. Good. Not great but definitely not bad either. It tried some new things where some worked and some not so much. It’s a well made game but it failed to get me excited for the new additions like Volta Football (Their version for street football).
So the first thing that I find ridiculous and a little bit funny has got to do with the licensing issues FIFA is starting to have. For those who played FIFA19, they will know that FIFA did not have the rights to the Brazilian National team and therefore had to put random players into the squad. The exact same thing has happened again however Neymar Jr for some reason is the only one that is not removed from the team. Now some may say that’s because of how big he is around the world, but that doesn’t explain the absence of players like Alisson Becker, the starting GK Liverpool, now does it. Now what makes this year’s FIFA different is that Juventus has also removed their licensing from FIFA, however they have kept all the players the same, so don’t worry we still got Ronaldo. They are called Piemonte Calcio and have a different, if so slightly similar, logo and same colors. I honestly have no idea why they decided this was a good idea, but I will say that it does frustrate me slightly. I mean if NBA 2K and NBA Live can both get licensing then why can’t FIFA and PES?
Now let’s move onto Volta football. This is FIFA’s attempt to bring back street football. Now I personally have played both Volta and I have also played FIFA street and personally FIFA Street did a much better job than Volta. For the past few years they have been bringing in storyline aspects into their career modes and they haven’t been all that bad either. This year however they wanted to add the street football aspect and make that the storyline that you had to go through. The storyline itself wasn’t actually that bad. You kind of got to know the characters around you and of course you had quite a few celebrity cameos, that are big in football and street football. The problem I had with this mode was the actual gameplay. You go in expecting to be able to do all the fancy tricks you want, to be able to make your opponent fall over themselves, but you actually get is literally a smaller version of FIFA. It’s just regular FIFA on a small court, THAT’S IT. You can’t really do too many tricks or your opponent gets the ball and scores, and so you end up just playing regular football and you sit there and think to yourself, why would I play this when I could play normal football with my favourite teams? There is no juking your player out, no breaking their ankles or nutmegging them, I found myself longing for it to be more like FIFA street where when you performed a trick, it staggered your opponent to make you feel like the trick really meant something.
Apart from this the only other addition they made was changin up the way you do your free kicks and penalties. Now with both of them you have a little circle where the ball is going to go, the longer you hold the shoot button the bigger the circle gets and the higher chance you have of spraying it wide, plus with freekicks after you hold the button you can use your right analog stick to choose to curl it or knuckleball it. The free kicks took a little getting used to, but personally I think it was a good change, I think it gives you more control over where you want the ball to go. Plus it also allows for you to take free kicks at lower levels and still be able to score from them, where before I felt a lot of the time the ball just didn’t go where you wanted it to. For penalties as well, I liked the change, the best thing it did was give you a lot more control. Now how high the ball goes is not determined by how much power is behind the ball, you can just dink it into the top corner.
Overall this game is a good game and for football fans I definitely think you will get a lot out of this game, however just remember that you don’t get everything out of this game that you could have.
Review by Dillon Vander Putten
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