FIFA 16 Ultimate Team is the latest mobile version of the world's most popular football simulator, and it arrives with a brand new engine and control scheme to boot. You'd better like Ultimate Team though because that's all there is. That's right - there's no career mode, no quick match, and no tournaments (outside of the Ultimate Team ones) so if you want to play as your favourite club, you're going to have to sign all those players yourself. FIFA 16, by and large, is the same FIFA game as the last couple of years. By no means is this to say it is a negative. In its entirety, the look and feel of the game is crafted beautifully and gives the audience that true-to-life experience, starting with play on the field.
 
Dribbling with the ball hasn’t felt this good before. With the new ability to dribble off of the ball, attackers have added a skill to their bevy of moves. This means you will be able to use a fake by holding left bumper or L1 and throw defenders off balance. Guys like Eden Hazard will greatly benefit when using such a technique, especially when you couple it with quick one-touch passes, which also feels like it has been tuned for a faster paced style. Clearly, the most important aspect of any football game is how it plays -- and FIFA 16 is a joy. EA has clearly paid attention to the flaws of last year’s game, which over-valued pace and lofted through balls. FIFA 16 is a slower, more skillful and tactical game.
 
In particular, play is transformed by the addition of driven passes: hold a shoulder button to ping a ground ball at full power across the turf. The new option makes possession play much more satisfying -- you’ll soon be spreading play across your back line like Barcelona -- while being counterbalanced by the risk of the receiving player miscontrolling the ball and losing possession. Crossing too is improved, as are defensive interceptions. The result is immediate: world-class passers like Andres Iniesta or David Silva finally feel menacing for their vision and touch, while League 2 teams require a less refined approach. Shots are less powerful, so getting into position is more important. Passes are able to cover less distance, so making sure that players are moving well off the ball is key.
 
And the game generally feels slightly more deliberate and much more spacious, so that it rewards a more thoughtful version of the game –rather than the end-to-end, fast paced, almost basketball-style play that has been tempered in Fifa 16 but still exists. Much of the real excitement in Fifa 16 isn’t so much about new features as fixes to annoying things about previous games. FIFA has long had a problem where you’re often ushered into scoring a particular type of goal, so at times you feel like you’re playing a game of football on rails. That’s where I stand for a header at the back post, this is where I go to lob a throughball to a striker, etc. This remains in FIFA 16, only it’s even less fun, as a more menacing goalkeeper AI stops more of these routines from ending up in the back of the net.
 
PES, meanwhile, has always been more open and chaotic, resulting in a greater variety of goals, whether through careful buildup or messy tap-ins. A goalkeeper AI change going in the other direction-they seem a little more lead-footed and a little more clumsy this year-only makes for weirder and even more random goals. Which sounds very unsporting, but this is a football game, and messy random shit ends up in a goal all the time. With this controversy, it still seems like half of the world is still trying to hold onto the fact that women should not be fooling around with soccer on the professional level. The angry tweets directed at EA looked like they belonged in the comment sections of a YouTube channel, with some fans going as far to say that they will not be purchasing FIFA 16.
 
Another comment that Rutter made, incidentally, belied a slightly disappointing attitude on EA’s part, and one that suggests that maybe not everyone involved in the game was necessarily desperate for this to happen either. When asked if the female teams would be able to play matches against the male ones, Rutter was slightly dismissive in saying, “The sport itself doesn’t support that. If that changed, we definitely would.”Yet in every single previous installment so far, it’s been possible to play FIFA matches between two iterations of the same team, despite the fact that neither the Laws of the Game nor available cloning technology would permit that to happen in reality. So it’s a shame that, for the moment at least, the women’s portion of the game will remain arbitrarily walled off from the rest of it.