FIFA 17 is a game bursting with content. From Match Day to Online Seasons, not to mention the new women's football tournament, there is plenty to entertain any football aficionado. However, there are two modes that attract most of our attention - Career and Ultimate Team. FUT is the most popular mode of the two these days, and you can count on an article about FUT coming in the near future, but today we will focus on Career mode.

 

The first thing you’ll notice when jumping into a match in FIFA 17 is how much slower everything feels compared to last year. This reduction in speed allows you to take the time to consider your next move, and you’ll need to think carefully as the game isn’t as forgiving as it has been in the past. Pace abusers will be stopped in their tracks, and splitting the defense with a through ball or a mazy run is much harder to achieve, and rightly so. The addition of the new Passing With Purpose feature allows players to make direct, decisive passes across the park.

 

However, I feel that there are still too many instances of ping-pong passing in the game, which is an issue that has resurfaced in the last few years. The advancements in FIFA 17 let you truly go on an offensive attack with precision passing including crosses and leads to set up solid shots on goal. The main limitations of FIFA 17 revolve around the core concept of only including the Ultimate Team mode. Since you start out on the lower end of the totem pole, everything that you can play is catered towards your team level.

That means, you can’t just play with your favorite team on hard difficulty, and instead need to begin with a group of random players on amateur difficulty. You need to work your way up through the simple beginnings to get to the more competitive matches, but doing so runs you into the in-app purchase upgrade wall. The FIFA 17 player is given little choice in what and how to play, and instead you need to go through a very specific route. That includes accelerated clock matches that are made for on the go gaming, and can really breeze past before you get into the flow of the game.

 

Other little changes on the field come in the shape of things like speed being less of a win-all stat. It’s something EA acknowledged as being an irritation of previous FIFAs, but the way the studio has ‘fixed’ the power of pace seems to have been… Well, to nerd it. Fast players are still fast, and given enough space they will pelt off down the wing away from all-comers, but generally speaking it feels much like FIFA 17 has just slowed down on-the-ball control a little bit, and/or given a little boost of speed to the defending player/s.

 

It feels clumsy as a solution and often leads to frustration, but this is a much lesser evil than the godlike prowess of pacey players in the past. An expert player, though, could regularly concede the majority of possession, but still win by a clear margin against all but the most capable opponents. Some players took it to extremes, where their ability to set up scoring opportunities with the absolute bare minimum of football made Charles Reep’s much-maligned Three Pass Optimum rule sound like a description of peak Guardian.

 

FIFA 17 represents an amazing improvement on FIFA. It also includes FIFA Ultimate Team 17 which was previously only available as after purchasing. You get to build your very own team through buying and selling players. However, you start with a very average bunch of players.