FIFA 07 Preview

Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Renaldo playing for the same 11? You bet but rather than international play, this was for Manchester United taking on Chelsea during an online press event hosted by EA Sports.

The idea was simple: put together writers from around the world for some online match play to get a feel for the game. The teams involved were Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal. Journalists were divided into groupings for each of the teams. The North American journalists were teamed with those from Portugal, Norway, Spain and Russian journalists to represents Manchester United (all play was one-versus-one) while German, Polish, Finnish and Belgian journalists carried Chelsea’s colors onto the pitch.

(English, Italian, Czech, Hungarian and Greek journalists were playing as Liverpool while French, Swedish, Danish and Dutch journalists had Arsenal.)

First off, hats off to futbolstar, who stuck it to this journalist in the first meeting by a 4-1 count. A rematch, though, was closer, with the European media member (who carries an amateur game tag with 40 points to his or her credit as opposed to the aspiring/wannabe tag – one point – handed this journalist) tallying the game-winner in the 86^th minute. The final was 3-2.

The game itself is rather intuitive, with anyone that has previously played an EA FIFA release able to jump in and give this game a go from the moment it launches.

Getting into the games was rather intuitive, just head into the Interactive League and pick your team and then search for a game with your selected fixture (team). It is not all that hard to get into the game.

Of course, the version received for this demo was not final product, and there were a few hiccups along the way, but generally speaking, the event could be termed a success.

The game physics are terrific, the player likenesses and attributes seem in line with the actual players (oh, what a joy to bench Renaldo and replace him with Peter Scholes!), and there are the associated moments of pure joy (watching a shot carom off the crossbar and drop back in front to have a hard-charging Rooney tap it into the back of the netting) and frustration (how does a shot go through the hands of a world-class keeper?).  

The interface is solid and not all that hard to navigate. While anticipated that the game will support Xbox Live voice, it did not seem available in the matches played.

The game physics seemed rather well rendered. The ball did take a few funny hops and was totally capable of bouncing off the posts, hitting the diving keeper in the back and bouncing back into the goal. The controls did have some of the memory lag – for lack of a better term – where you would tap the pass control too hard and the receiving player would continue the pass out of touch even though a thumb was no where near the pass hot button at the time the ball was received.

Still the game and event proved to be thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable. This was only a preview of things to come with this FIFA title, but from this all-to-brief look, EA has a sure-fire winner on its hands.