Review: EA FC Sports 27 - A Football Buffet

A review copy was provided by EA.

Writing a review for a new FIFA game (sorry, FC 27) is always a challenging task. Its player base is massive and incredibly diverse, ranging from addicted, competitive FUT players willing to spend extra cash to improve their skills and achievements, all the way to elementary or middle school kids who recently spent their summer and holiday breaks grinding through another season late into the night (which is great fun). Furthermore, there have been plenty of years without any substantial changes between entries, aside from graphical upgrades that could have just been a patch and a roster update. Still, in certain years, the developers try to reinvent the wheel by tweaking the game engine. Over the past two years, since splitting from the official FIFA organization, it seems the developers have been trying to introduce new and varied game modes. So what changed this year, what works, and what falls flat? We cover it all in our late review of this year's annual football title.

Welcome to The Grounds

Let's not waste any time and dive straight into the biggest and most significant new addition in this latest release: The Grounds. It seems that even the team behind FC 27 decided that if everyone else has an open world, they deserve one too, especially in a year when a new GTA is coming out. EA went into the boardroom and came up with an idea that, quite honestly, works pretty well.

The Grounds is a sort of football city designed with a very European flair. Certain areas will remind you of Amsterdam, others of southern or northern Italy, and there are districts reminiscent of Paris or Buenos Aires (yes, it is in South America, but it has a European style). Scattered throughout this city are pitches, each offering a slightly different type of football match with varying rules and player counts. You can find BucketBall, where you have to kick a ball into a basket, or Bocce Ball, which is similar to lawn bowls and requires passing the ball as close as possible to a specific point. Of course, there are also 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 matches, as well as the 5v5 Rush mode, which features 4 human players on each team alongside an AI goalkeeper in a continuous 7-minute match.

This is one of the modes I played the most, simply because it feels the closest to a casual neighborhood pickup game. Teams are matched relatively evenly in terms of overall rating, yet every player brings their own distinct style. You will meet players who make runs into space, others who only want the ball passed directly to their feet, skillers, and defenders. Essentially, you get the exact vibe of a Friday afternoon or Tuesday evening match at your local pitch. In this mode, offsides are only called in the final third, meaning you can easily be that lazy player standing past the halfway line yelling for a pass. Another nice touch is that rough fouls result in a blue card that sends the offending player off for a single minute, similar to Gerard Pique's King's League (who is mostly known for being Shakira's ex).

As you make your way around the city in The Grounds, you will run into familiar faces like Kylian Mbappe, who accompanies you right from the start, as well as Paulo Dybala and Chloe Kelly (the England national team player), who will give you tips and help you earn upgrades. Another character joining you is (remember him?) Alex Hunter, the main protagonist from FIFA 18's story mode, who introduces you to Mbappe as the rising prospect in the world of football.

Not only can you customize the appearance of the character you bring into The Grounds however you see fit, but you can also choose their playstyle. Within that playstyle selection, there are subcategories. For instance, if you pick a defensive style, you unlock 3 sub-styles: Progressor, which specializes in long balls; Boss, which is physical and aggressive; or Marauder, which focuses on tackles and speed. The same principle applies if you choose to play as a midfielder or a forward, giving you a total of 13 different archetypes to choose from.

While you spend your time wandering the city, various hoops and targets will occasionally pop up, letting you kick a ball at them out of thin air. This charming addition makes getting around more pleasant and adds a bit of flair, though the novelty wears off pretty quickly.

What works less well is having to wait for matches. Because the city is an open world populated by real players, joining a match requires you to stand inside a marked box outside the pitch and wait until enough players join and press a button to ready up. This process can be quite tedious. Sometimes people stand inside the box and forget to confirm. On one occasion, I stood in the box, stepped away for a few minutes expecting it to fill up, and came back to find the match still hadn't started. I eventually just gave up and left.

The aspect that probably hurts this mode the most is that player progression relies heavily on purchasing coins and experience points (XP). It is clear that EA has adopted mobile gaming tactics and is trying to apply them to console and PC titles. While this has been happening in FUT for years, seeing it pushed so heavily in The Grounds feels like yet another attempt to milk the player base. It would have been much smarter to give players a microtransaction-free first year so they could settle in and see if they even like the open-world concept. Starting out immediately with such an aggressive approach risks leaving the pitches empty, which is a real shame. Overall, The Grounds is a refreshing innovation that manages to add real value to the familiar FIFA formula. Just please, go a little easier on the monetization.

Arcade or Grounded Gameplay

In the standard game, much like last year, you can choose between an "Arcade" or a realistic gameplay style. This choice drastically impacts the pace, accuracy, pass and shot success rates, player athleticism, and nearly every other aspect on the pitch. This year, I decided to focus on the more realistic style, and I have to admit I felt a deep appreciation for the realism alongside profound frustration with my own performance.

How long you hold down the pass or shoot button is critical to hitting your target. The power has to be remarkably precise. This requirement turns the experience into a pretty solid football simulator, though it also leads to some hair-raising misses. Shots that would have ended up as gorgeous top-corner goals in the Arcade mode suddenly turn into balls slowly rolling right into the goalkeeper's hands. Beyond that, the pace of play is significantly slower, even in matches between Barcelona and Real Madrid, both of which boast athletic and technical squads this season that border on Space Jam levels. In short, if last year's realistic style frustrated you, this year's iteration will demand an even higher level of clinical precision with every touch of the controller.

So What Else is on the Menu?

Beyond that, all the familiar modes like Player and Manager Career, Seasons, tournaments, and everything else you have grown used to in recent years are still here. Before every match, the game gives you the option to watch lengthy cinematic intros. The folks behind FC 27 are apparently living under the illusion that we aren't addicted to dopamine and still have 1980s-level patience, so they packed in around 30 different broadcast packages that mimic real television broadcasts from various leagues around the world. This includes cinematic transitions, lineup presentations, drone shots, fireworks displays, and even scenes in the player tunnel featuring small talk between footballers.

If all these animations are meant to keep people employed at EA, then that is great, because it is content nobody really asked for and that most people simply skip. That being said, to EA's credit, the attention to detail here is massive, and everything is crafted with very high graphical quality.

The Bottom Line

FC 27 positions itself as the world's biggest football buffet. It truly has a bit of everything for everyone: women's leagues, online minigames of all kinds, custom character creation, past legends, the competitive FUT mode (which we didn't touch on here simply for lack of space), manager career, training modes, and more. It is almost impossible for a football fan not to find something to connect with here. However, this abundance requires finding your bearings, and just as importantly, the patience to learn the nuances and find the gameplay pace that suits you best. Anyone who hasn't played since the versions from 4 or 5 years ago and jumps in now will find a game with menus that feel completely foreign, alongside a volume of content that is several magnitudes larger.

Despite all this, it is impossible to escape the feeling that we are approaching a point of no return. Creative ideas are running dry, and the excuse for selling a brand-new, full-priced game every single year is becoming harder to swallow. In the past, graphical leaps were the main justification for a new release, whereas today those improvements are minor to nonexistent. Having already added women's leagues and a massive number of game modes, EA has almost no cards left up its sleeve. This year, we can still give them credit thanks to the addition of The Grounds, though by FC 28 or 29, that is going to be much harder to do. And that is before we even mention the microtransactions popping up around every corner, asking for even more money from players who have already paid full price for the game.