FIFA Soccer 11

If you're looking for a football game fully capable of recreating the real atmosphere and feelings you'd experience on the pitch, FIFA 11 is surely the answer. If you consider yourself a football fan, you absolutely can't miss it.

The passing is perfect, graphics [are] breathtaking and the new modes are worth your time and then some.

To many it'll still seem ludicrous that sports games are worth the purchase every year, but for anyone who's ever kicked a football in their life, this is the definitive choice.

Fun, intelligent and far better than FIFA 10. EA Sports has found its path and they clearly know what they're doing.

FIFA brings it, and although I wouldn't put this game up with the best EA Soccer games of all time, your money will still be well spent if you go home with it.

On the surface FIFA 11 looks like a younger identical brother of FIFA 10. Some will find the most glaring problem with the game's new passing system a step in the wrong direction.

I know this all sounds negative, but I also know FIFA could be much more than it already is -- and as a soccer fan, I want the series to take the same leap I saw Madden take. Still, FIFA's always a recommendable experience.

FIFA is the absolute football simulation for any fan or casual gamer. The game has come a long way and beat competition long time now. The gameplay is extraordinary with passing feeling better and smoother than ever. Online matches run perfectly and makes you come back for more.

With the once great Pro Evolution Soccer series continuing to struggle this gen FIFA is now the choice for most gamers. If you've enjoyed the series you’ll not be disappointed, just don't go expecting anything particular new or innovative.

Game was more fun than Fifa 11 and I liked the player/player manager/manager mode transitions but I disliked how I was asked to play against low level oppositions when low on stamina especially when there is a midweek match against a good team. I wish it had an option to start me as a substitute or if I'm leading by 2-0 or something at half time, it would rest me. AI was a bit weird at times but the game play was a bit better.. hate how crosses would go into the wrong place with auto settings.. better than Fifa 10 but still not up to par :(

I reviewed this as a 10 at first but gradually I have found more and more problems with this game. The "all new" career mode has even less depth than ever before, no youth system, no scouting, no picking backroom staff. Annoying e-mails from your assistant manager telling you that you have spotted a good player almost all the time. I KNOW THATS WHY I BOUGHT HIM! Micro freezing still hasnt been fixed. Player growth is poorly thought out, Lower league teams have all the kits and names but plain goalkeeper shirts. Why have they been so lazy as to exclude goalkeeper shirts? Instead opting to just a give a plain shirt wth no sponsor or badge. Pro clubs online has had a server update and more servers added but it still hasnt fixed anything. That mode doesnt work. Personality + is a BAD thing. You cannot have a competitive game that throws in so many random elements. The AI on your team sometimes randomly decides to stick a foot in with bad timing without you controlling it and get a player sent off for a menial challenge. For this next one fan boys will say "oh well get better duh" At times the passing is ridiculous, I will be stood with no pressure on me in an open space and all the time in the world, press A to then pass to a player right next to me and sometimes it has passed in completely the opposite direction because a players personality in real life will suggest that he is not good at passing. If Im playing a fighting game and I tell my character to hit a punch and the computer says "sometimes in real life this guy misses this particular punch so I will make this punch go out wide and miss his face" I wouldnt play it competitively. Fighting in real life is down to me controlling the situation. Football in real life is the same. It may seem random when looking at it but the way it is controlled is not random. A game needs to do what its told otherwise it basically renders a strategy or skill useless because it may or may not decide to do it. This is not realistic. My leg doesnt randomly decide to pass in the opposite direction to where my brain tells it in real life. Random environment events in a game work, randomising character controlled actions do not. This glitch happens everytime I play a friends league online. For example I pick Marseille as my team in the league. I then play head to head matches after I finish the league and pick Chelsea. My team and shirt are chelsea but if I go to team management it will have the Marseille team list. Go to start game with this and you will have a Marseille player in a chelsea shirt in the arena and then your game will freeze after about 6 seconds. This happens 90% of the time. If you do get a pro clubs game then your randomised team mates that arent pros probably wouldnt even be fit to play in League 2. They are easily out paced and muscled off the ball and so virtual pros stand out from the pack and can stroll through creating unrealistic high scoring games for both sides a lot of the time. This is after only a few weeks of the games release. Imagine what this is like towards the end of the season when the random AI players havnt grown with the virtual pros and the pros are now all much better than even Terry, Puyol, Messi or Ozil with 98% of the accomplishments complete! Its pointless. Im only on 30% and my pro is already better than half Chelsea or Man Utds players. What is good about this game? Well the keepers are fixed and I have scored only 1 lobbed goal and nobody has against me so thats not too easy. The actually gameplay is alright in terms of physics. Graphics are better than last year. Ummm, I can pick my own chants. Oh wait no I cant because if you create your own chants apparently the game cant deal with it and freezes. In all honestly now having played this game more I wish I hadnt wasted my money. Ive spent more time restarting my console with all the glitches and freezing than I have actually playing the thing. Apparently there is a fix on the way but I feel for people who play offline when a developer relies so heavily on updates they cant be bothered to test a game. I remember when online updates didnt exist and games had to be released in working order.

As has become customary with EA's Fifa the initial wow factor soon gives way to the realisation that the game has the usual endemic flaws ranging from the mildly annoying to the game breaking. It is staggering that EA can continuously release a game that is clearly unfinished and where game modes are riddled with bugs. The new concept of Career Mode, hardly a groundbreaking mode in itself, is severely let down by the amount of basic glitches affecting player growth which pretty much renders the mode redundant to name but one. Online the game is a mess. I was initially very impressed with the gameplay as it is definitely more of a challenge this year. However, even here the more i play the game the more i am getting fed up with the hackneyed way in which some of the players behave. Offline the AI of the player controlled teams suffers terribly from a badly designed switching system as mentioned by JudgeMental. This seems to occur regardless of whether you have it set to auto or manual. This gets you into all sorts of problems when trying to do some basic defending as you aren't able to move your defenders into position quick enough to deal with basic through balls and crosses. As the CPU AI has improved considerably (which is one of the good things about Fifa 11) you end up coughing up goals simply due to the fact that you can't get your own players to compete for the ball. The CPU AI will actively intervene to intercept loose passes whereas the players you control stand around looking at the ball and don't seem to have the capacity to stick out a leg to try and gain possession. Trying to win a header from a goal kick seems impossible for these reasons although, strangely this doesn't seem to affect going for headers in the penalty box which forms the most likely route to goal due to the AI defenders, no matter what club they play for, being able to brush you off the ball effortlessly if you try just about anything on the ground. There are some gameplay improvements and i do respect the fact that EA has tried to tighten up the obvious exploits from previous iterations which always lead to the same route to goal. These were absolutely necessary and it is commendable that EA has striven to make the game more realistic by eliminating things such as the oft maligned 'ping pong passing'. However, it appears to me that this has been poorly executed and has all the obvious signs of being rushed onto the shelves without adequate testing. The bugs affecting Career Mode are particularly galling when you consider the atrocious Manager Mode from FIFA 10, which EA did not fix. To repeat this with FIFA 11 is unacceptable.