Say what you want about EA, but they sure know how to make big budget well presented games. Their sports titles usually have more game modes than fingers on your hands, a soundtrack with something to like for everyone, expensive looking cutscenes and enough licensed players to populate a small country. EA jumped on the extreme sports bandwagon by starting the EA Big sub label, where they carried on making high quality sports titles. They may not change much every year when they release a "sequel" to their sports lineup, but the production values are always very high. Until now that is. Fifa Street, the latest in the usually quite nice Street sport series, has all the negative aspects of EA titles but lacks the positive ones. Don't you believe us? Just read on, you'll see.

Yet they still wear their footy kits. Deary me.

Rule the Streets

Fifa Street is an attempt to make soccer more simple and accessible by giving it a trick system and by shrinking the teams and playfields. You play street soccer in back alleys of big cities all around the globe with teams of four players. There are three game modes, the first sign of the absence of the usual EA polish, Game On, Friendly and Rule the Streets. Game On and Friendly are basically the same modes, apart from the fact that you can change which players are on your team in Friendly. That effectively means you only have two game modes, a single match option and the Rule the Streets career mode. Rule the Streets also doesn't offer much diversion, you can travel across the globe with your own team, challenge teams in all sorts of events and earn all sorts of statistics. That sounds nice, but all you really do is play the same four on four matches over and over again. Now if only these matches were fun to play...

Responsive? Not really

Fifa is often criticized for it's unresponsive controls; Fifa Street takes them even further. Your players feel like they're running around with a heavy hangover, try to turn around and they trip over their own feet before picking up speed again. This is particularly annoying when you try to switch to a player closer to the ball, if he was running the other way before you switched you lose precious time turning around, enough time for your opponent to pass you by without any trouble almost every time. The tricks you can pull off are fun to watch, but you don't have enough control over them to use them effectively. The way the game queue's your input is also very frustrating at times, if you try to tackle an opponent (B) a tad too late and your keeper catches the ball before your tackle is initiated, your keeper immediately kicks the ball (also B) to the other side of the field, giving back the ball to the opponent. Where the game's controls should be direct and simple like an arcade game, it has sluggish and unresponsive ones like a cheap cartoon license.

Not quite jumpers for goalposts but hey, who needs those usual fancy stadums.

Spit and polish

More surprising than the controls is the presentation of the game. EA's games have the biggest budgets around and that usually shows. Fifa Street screams "cheap" in every aspect. The animations don't link fluidly at all, the ska/breakbeat soundtrack repeats itself far too often, your teammate AI is almost nonexistent and navigating the menus feels clumsy. You can select widescreen mode in the options but that only makes the menus widescreen, and leaves you with fat players and an egg for a ball. The licenses also aren't used to their full potential, lots of teams are missing. Lots of your friendly matches take place in Amsterdam for instance, but Dutch players are nowhere to be found. It's all not the end of the world, but it's really disappointing that a game that begs for a modern flashy presentation feels like a game that went straight to the bargain bins.

Final Say

This could've been a fun arcade game with fast controls and cool looking special moves. Instead it's a cheap watered down version of soccer with no depth at all and very unresponsive controls. The music and especially the commentator seem to be put in only to make you want to turn the sound off. If you can look past all of these annoyances, you must be a very forgiving person. The special moves look nice and the game is relatively easy to pick up, but that's about all it has going for it. So don't buy this unless you absolutely have to, for whatever reason that may be.