I've played FIFA games several times throughout the years but never owned one. After playing the Demo of this, I was hooked. I ordered it the same night. There are however, a few issues with the game that are irritating. Here's what i've found in the first 4 days since owning…



The following is based on my play in Career Mode (In no particular order):



1. Levels of Difficulty seem to change drastically.

Going from Amateur (which is one step up from Beginner/easiest level) to Semi-Pro is a HUGE difference. In Amateur Career Mode, my player has 43 goals in just 25 games and each games ends in a blowout, shutout. The team scores between 4-7 goal per game. It's absurd. The opposing team never even gets a shot off the entire game, as my team intercepts just about every pass on their way down field. Trying to avoid such ease, I switched to Semi-Pro. Unfortunately for me, I was getting destroyed and beyond frustrated with how much harder it was. I believe there are only 2 more difficulty levels, Pro and Legendary. I can't even imagine playing those. In Semi-Pro, the opposing players will NOT let you down the field. I've been tackled and passes are constantly intercepted. I barely even got a shot on goal. And the goalie turns into a god somehow. So basically, i went from obliterating teams, to losing every one of them. Sure, in the game settings there are Sliders to let you tweak player operated teams and CPU players. Even then it takes forever to find balance, plus, should i even have to be doing that? EA got this all messed up.



2. Demoted somehow??

I chose Manchester United as my team. I started with them thinking i would be a sub/bench player with my player rating being so low (as a Striker), plus Zlatan is the lone Striker for ManU. Somehow, the coach had me start the first game of the season. I scored a goal and an assist but got injured in the same game (Injuries will be #3 for issues. Stay tuned). The injury was severe enough for me to miss 8 weeks of the season. Directly after this, the manager is emailing me that i've been injured and sit tight. Suddenly i'm put on loan to an EFL 2 club without reason. This makes zero sense. My player was impressive in the first match he played yet there's no option to sit it out and Simulate the games that i've missed. It was really strange the way it happened. There was no choice but to accept the loan, without knowledge of a call back from the club. If this is the case, why not just start you in an EFL 2 club?



3. Injuries.

I had heard that the FIFA franchise has recently had issues with easy injuries, and serious ones at that. I found that out from experience by somehow getting injured in just my first game. You can turn both injury Sliders down in the game settings but again, why didn't EA just do this themselves or at least tell you first?



4. Rules and Bullcrap

Seems like every play no matter what, is Offsides. This game freakin loves this. It gets old FAST. Another thing is Tackling. You rack up the Yellow Cards and Red Cards if you're not careful. Your team warns you in emails that they have no tolerance for those, but at the same time, you find out you're suspended for a game. So, the warning isn't really a warning at all. It started off with getting 2 Red Cards in 4 games. Now all i have to do is get one Yellow and i'm suspended. It's dumb.



5. Training

The Training happens in between matches. You choose up to 5 things to work on that allows your player the opportunity to enhance his abilities in Defense, Shooting, Passing, Penalty Kicks, etc. These are the best way to get your Player's overall rating up, and make him better. This is a good thing and i like it. The issues I have with it are that you have this option too many times. Yes, you're given the option to simulate the training, but it always turns out much worse than if you took the 5-10 minutes to do it yourself. I mean, you just want to play matches, right? They should have an algorithm set up in order to match how you usually do in each chosen training session and just match it, not make it worse.



6. Don't quote me on this, but i'm yet to find Franchise mode/Career Season.

I really wanted to just play out seasons as ManU but when i got to the main menu for the first time, there was nothing but The Journey, Career, Games, and FUT available. Without looking too far into it, i'm guessing that you're forced to play Online if you want to do a career with one team. I don't like that. Plus, why is The Journey and Career not the same thing??



Overall, i'm having a good time with the game. I can play any sports games for hours. I can sort of feel myself getting bored with this because of how repetitive it can be. It kind of sucks that i'm stuck playing Career Mode because I can only control the one player. It's always pass it up field and get a Through Pass for a goal. Dribbling and protecting the ball aren't hard, but the dribbling moves are. I mess that up all the time and it's more frustrating to lose the ball than it is fun. In playing through a season of being in a crappy EFL 2 league, I can only hope that getting called up to the Premier League makes the game more interesting.