Sometimes, I really do wonder what goes on in people’s heads. 2006 FIFA World Cup came out just over a week before this review was written, and I purposefully held back from submitting my review, just to see if I could have a look at some of the reviews from the larger sites and to see if I was going completely crazy. It seems that I must be mad, since everyone else is running reviews praising EA for making an above-average game. In my eyes, this is a new low for the FIFA series.
It isn’t the presentation that’s at fault ‘ not by a long way. In fact, 2006 FIFA World Cup represents the finest presentation and feeling of ‘being there’ that I’ve seen in any sports game to date, bar none. The stadium fly-ins, the commentary from Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend, the pre-game music and the sheer volume of the crowd at times make you feel that if you closed your eyes, you’d believe that the game was being shown on BBC1. It’s THAT good.
It isn’t in the selection of game modes either. Play in the qualifying rounds of the 2006 World Cup, play in the finals themselves, go online and play, or take a shot at the ‘Global Challenge’ mode, which is simply a scenario-based mode that extends the life of the game – there’s plenty to do. It isn’t necessarily the control system either, which can be set to classic FIFA controls using either d-pad or analogue stick for dribbling, or PES-style controls with the same choices.
No, the only thing badly wrong with 2006 FIFA World Cup is the way the game plays when you actually get onto the pitch and take control of your favourite team. Be they the Ivory Coast, Fiji, or a Rooney-full England lineup, they all slide about the pitch as if they’re made of feathers, hoofing a rock-like ball into the air at every opportunity. If that sounds harsh, it was meant to. In-game, it feels like the development team have sat back and decided that it is absolutely fine to have the CPU team part like the Red Sea when you play a through ball on the normal difficulty level, leading to hundreds of one-on-ones with the keeper. They thought it was fantastic that the new shot system (that basically seems to allow you to press the shoot button for any amount of time with little difference to the outcome) would favour the offensive player so much more when you do get into these heads-up battles with the goalkeeper, it makes it difficult not to score. Indeed, they thought it would be absolutely fine to put new graphics on a tired, tired old game engine that is inferior to Pro Evolution Soccer/Winning Eleven in absolutely every way.
Well, it isn’t.
Spin-offs like UEFA Champions League and the Euro 2004 games weren’t that bad ‘ at least they were playable for more than twenty minutes. World Cup 2006 isn’t, once you’ve found that the sheer number of ‘cheese’ goals and over-the-top diving saves are pretty much all that the game has to offer. I wanted to love this game. I needed a World Cup fix, and how. The introductory pieces, the music and the graphical pre-game performance will make you feel patriotic. They’ll make you want to physically stand up and go ‘COME ON, LADS!’ as the referee’s whistle sounds to start the action. And then it does, and you feel like your once proud and historic national team has been reduced to playing in a park on a Sunday morning in the pissing rain, with a dog chasing the ball if it so much as even looks like its running out of play. Like your dreams of ever wanting to reach the World Cup final itself were absolutely ridiculous in the first place. More to the point, you’ll be able to feel all of this and not concentrate at all on the game being played ‘ yet still somehow manage to run in four goals before half-time. All of them dainty little auto-chips over the keeper from the edge of the penalty area, and all of them set up by some ham-fisted use of the through-ball. What I’m saying is that FIFA used to be a decent, solid game, that was always (in terms of gameplay) just pipped at the post by PES ‘ in some cases by the narrowest of margins. Now, it feels like the game engine should be completely retired and that the development team should start again, making the players feel less like ballet dancers and more like footballers; making the ball feel less like a rock on the ground and less like a butterfly in the air.
You see, what the developers are getting wrong is that they think that there is one thing ever-so slightly wrong with the game engine, hence the single change in gameplay each year ‘ be it to add an ‘Off The Ball’ control system, or to remove it two years later. There isn’t one thing wrong. There are stacks and stacks of little things wrong that can’t be ironed out by introducing a new feature. Why does every cross somehow manage to reach the striker so low, that he doesn’t need to jump to head the ball’ Why does the woodwork get troubled at least ten times in each match, when in real life, the post and bar very rarely get struck by the ball’ Why is it that I can tap the shoot button at one point and send a rocket to the top corner, that the keeper has to dive to save, but yet when I do it from the same spot, with the same player a second later, he side-foots the ball safely into the keeper’s waiting arms’ How come I can’t skip the cinematics when a substitute comes on’ Why does my striker stand and stare at the ball, but not actually move when the keeper blocks a header and the ball is in front of an open goal’ The list goes on. The definitive question would have to be something along the lines of ‘Why does the developer not believe that we can generate our own exciting matches” Pro Evolution Soccer doesn’t do anything ’strange.’ Like make a soft shot suddenly start blazing through the air at 120mph to make it look like a netbuster. 2006 FIFA World Cup does. Its as if the developer is falsely injecting excitement into the game by making the keeper deflect every other shot rather than catching it, or by making every other header hit the post. It just doesn’t feel right.
