Defenders have also been buffed a lot, and the AI has been greatly improved to become even more intelligent - yet slightly too overpowered. If you fail to tackle your opponent, your AI teammates will often succeed, catching up to even the fastest players that have beaten them. Offense is more about passing rather than crossing or running, which is good for defending players but a little annoying for attackers. However it’s hard to look past the flaws in the game, where pace and over-the-top through balls rule all and the Gervinho, Doumbia and Ibarbo hyperlink strikes fear into the hearts of players. If FIFA 16 wants to prove itself as the best football game on the planet, Ultimate Team has to improve and there’s a number of features and fixes for EA to consider.
Some might be considered common sense, while others might seem a bit controversial, but hey, what’s the point in playing it safe? Jockeying has changed too, not mechanically, but in the way it behaves. In FIFA 15 if you jockey slightly left and your opponent goes right, there's instantly five yards of separation between you. It's way too sensitive, and it's really easy to overshoot the position you were actually aiming for as the defender. That's all been smoothed out in FIFA 16 by allowing defenders to turn tighter per frame, meaning you can now position with greater accuracy, and react at more acute angles from jockey positions. Jockeying should by definition provide defenders with a position of strength and high agility against oncoming attackers (that's why they do it after all) and in this FIFA 16 build it's probably the best I've seen in terms of 1v1's feeling like an even duel.
It’s to that end that those fixes mentioned earlier have been implemented, the things you hate nullified. Defending gets perhaps the biggest overhaul. That pace problem is eased with some new animations--defenders turned by a trick or a step now have a pivoting animation which spins them quicker and retains momentum--while under the surface, player acceleration curves have been tinkered with to give beaten players a more realistic chance of getting back for a second challenge. Even more satisfyingly, the sliding tackles, which for a while have felt neutered into mid-range lunges, have been given back some of their ferocity and force. They have more range, they can once again be used to anticipate and block shots or passes and, with that eye on keeping defenders in the game, tapping ‘X’ at the end of a mis-timed slide will bring your tackler back to their feet in one smooth movement.
Not to be one that complains without a solution - one suggestion is that FIFA take an approach to rate your league relative to the league itself, as opposed to a single global rating basis. That might, for example, place a top player like Besart Berisha at a high 96 rating for A-League matches in a relative sense, and back to his world-rating of 72 if taking on an international team. At least this approach would make Australian clubs a bit more fun to play as an Aussie - and help with career mode progression, too. If you prefer not to run through the drills yourself, you can have them run automatically and still benefit from any stat point increases that they yield. You can also check your email account for messages from the people in your soccer life like your manager and agent. There are also goals for you to meet that will help to advance your career and keep you on the team, and you can check in on your career stats and scores from around the league.
Before each season begins you'll partake in pre-season friendly matches, and although these do not contribute to your career goals and stats, they do give you the chance to train up your skills before the actual season begins. There’s a whole raft of new skill games designed to hone your skills, as well as a nifty graphical overlay - dubbed the FIFA Trainer - that can be toggled on or off depending on preference and shows the button options available to the player you’re controlling. It’s a cool take on the usual instruction manuals and tutorial videos, and - although a little distracting - really helps you get to grips with the controls. Hell, it helped cut down the number of fouls by improving by tackling percentages and enabled me to score a few glorious free kicks - and that can’t be a bad thing.
FIFA Ultimate Team is pretty much the Hearthstone of football where you are given a random selection of player cards which you use to create the best team you can, while taking into account the different ways the cards buff each other. Then you take your team into tournaments and compete to win extra coins which you can then use to buy new packs and improve your team.
