FIFA is one of those games that is on every Latino's set at one point in their life; more obligatory than Call of Duty or any other major franchise. I, as a semi-casual fan of football, am not really the best FIFA player nor the biggest fan who needs to buy the latest release on the first day, but I enjoy me some good football simulator with my friends.
FIFA 17 is this year's release in the series, and it features updated graphics – finally!!! – and a new engine, which makes the game run smoother and better than ever. In that aspect, the game is the best football game to ever be released by EA Sports, and a great breath of fresh air after a streak of underwhelming and unnoticeable changes in previous entries.
However, the single biggest change in this year's game is the addition of a campaign. In it, you play as young English player Alex Hunter, who tries to do his best with his newfound career in the Premier League. Following Hunter's path to glory is entertaining enough in the gameplay aspect, making him stronger with training and goals and feeling very satisfied with his rise to fame and the acclaim of the commentators. Nevertheless, in every other aspect, the campaign fails.
Let me tell you what it is before I explain how and why. First of all, the campaign's story is completely predictable; Alex fights for it, gets some, falls from grace, recovers, goes back to the top, lives happily ever after. It's so boring and played out, I just wish EA had space for something else. Sadly, that's not all.
Yes, the game's graphics are better than ever, but that doesn't mean they're perfect. That makes the cutscenes in the story to look okay at best, but cringeworthy when featuring any cameo – and most of them awful and forced – by a famous football player. Because these are real people that we know, their models in the game look cheap and really push the measures of the uncanny valley, taking you out of the story completely. That, without counting the lameness of their cameos, pushed into the game for the player to be "surprised," I guess.
But where I feel the campaign fails the hardest is in its world building. Yes, it has a Twitter page where you see tweets from the characters that surround you, but everything looks so f*cking fake, it angers me. No teams or real life players ever say anything, and the characters that do – a fictional player from your team, your mom, or your agent, mostly – have the most pathetic and repetitive tweets, usually wishing you well in the next game. It's just stupid and lazy, and takes me out of the story more than bringing me in.
The backgrounds during the cinematics look awful as well, all bland and shallow, with nothing to make it feel like the real world. There's no sense of a city or life in the world around the few talking characters, and wherever you train or shower really doesn't feel like what you'd really see inside the Premier League.
Similarly, because the game has to adapt and play exactly the same no matter which team in the Premier League you pick, the interactions with your trainer, teammates and fans are extremely bland. No real trainer would say, "Now he transferred to one of our biggest rivals," just no. He would scream, "That bloody bastard had the balls to transfer to Manchester United!" Sadly, the E for Everyone rating FIFA has to have limits these dialogue interactions.
Everything is so unnatural and fake, it doesn't feel like a real story at all. Same with Hunter's interviews; his responses are perfectly okay, but the way the interviewer has to ask questions as the game loads and has no reaction to Hunter's attitude, it just feels useless.
In most ways, I understand why this happens. EA can't polish the game to the point where every single detail is adapted to your choices, and of course they can't make you choose a team to play at, because I'm sure there's people who'd feel insulted if they had to play with Arsenal or Liverpool. And the player cameos are more like items on a checklist than anything else, having to make the player feel that Alex Hunter really made it.
It sucks, though, because it sets very strong limitations for what EA can do to tell a compelling story. In the dressing rooms, you only interact with the fictional players in your team, while the real ones don't even show up in the backgrounds. Yeah, I understand that this is because they can't just capture every single player's likeness and dialogue, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck The E rating of the game also brings it down quiet a bit, as Alex goes through family and personal problems that simply cannot be fully fleshed out.
In the end, the campaign is inoffensive. It doesn't really matter if you play it or not, and it won't change anything in your game other than giving you a new Ultimate Team card. You can use it to practice your gameplay if you want, but I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than that, because it simply fails. Story, characters, graphics, world building and drama; everything sucks.
Cheers.
