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It always takes a while to form definitive impressions of EA Sports FC games. As the community gets to grips with the intricacies of the new gameplay mechanics, the exploits come to the forefront, and the game is patched, the full picture becomes clear. However, having played 20 hours of FC 27, there’s already plenty of good and bad in this year’s game.
The single big ask from players was that defending was improved for FC 27. A move away from a focus on AI defending to make manual actions more rewarding has become a necessity, and EA Sports has insisted pre-launch that they’ve managed it. Thankfully, their work has mostly done the job.
Defenders make tackles more reliably. You have to press the button to do it, and defenders taking the ball off the attacker without any input from you is much, much rarer. Tackle at the right time, and you’ll come away with the ball more often than you don’t. That also means you can’t sit back and wait for the AI to do the work for you. This is a hugely welcome change that’s been top of wishlists for years, and it removes a huge amount of the frustration that FC 26 caused.
It may be partly by design to ensure players don’t rely on AI defending, but the intelligence of non-player-controlled defenders – fullbacks in particular – is really poor. Left backs and right backs often wander off when players run towards them, or are five yards too deep when defending on the edge of their box. And since attackers are so agile, it’s difficult to keep switching back and forth to move them back into the right position when they go for a stroll in the wrong direction. Hopefully, better players with the Defender++ Role won’t be so out of position, but I don’t have the funds to buy them just yet.
On the attacking side, things have improved, too. Forwards genuinely make better runs off the ball. They’ll hang on your opponents’ defensive line, making runs at the right time; they’ll make curved runs to stay onside, and even run from outside to in. Even when using players with basic Roles, attackers will still make decent movements, at least in comparison to recent games.
The game feels quicker at the start than it often has in previous entries. Gameplay feels smooth, and passing is reliable, even if I’ve had some matches with terrible input delay. I put that down to my limited matchmaking options pre-release, though.
One area in which EA Sports hasn’t quite achieved what they set out to do is balancing playstyles and ensuring there are lots of ways to score. While the finesse shot has absolutely been nerfed, with it seemingly impossible to score the curved shot from outside the box, the low-driven shot is at FIFA 17 levels of overpowered. Low shots towards the front post, or low-driven finesse shots from around the penalty spot, are the most reliable ways to score. Headers? Forget about it. Long shots? Don’t bother. Run down the wing, pass to the player free at the edge of the box, and low-driven shot it towards the near post once you have some free space. Simple as that. While I don’t want EA Sports to overdo it with the updates, I hope a balance patch for shooting comes relatively soon. Elsewhere, though, Playstyles have been balanced well. Bruiser is no longer overpowered, with players’ attributes having more of an impact on whether they’re good enough than in recent years.
In Ultimate Team, there have been some welcome, if minor, changes. Draft, Rivals, Champions, and Squad Battles are getting tired now, and FC needs a big, brand-new mode in the coming years, but Gallery is a brilliant addition. By introducing a collection book feature, which doesn’t require you to actually submit players, it ensures every single item you get has a value, even if you don’t want to keep them. It means you don’t have to change the way you play and build your club just to fill in Gallery pages. I can see it being huge with the hardcore FC audience as the year goes on, as long as the rewards are kept up to date.
The new SBC system, which assigns a value to every player that increases for rarity and rating, makes it much easier to complete the challenges and utilize what you have in your club. Want to get rid of 20 78-rated golds instead of a couple of 85s? You can do that, which adds so much more freedom to completing SBCs, again adding more value to every player in the game.
Getting XP towards the season pass for every game you play is also a welcome change. It means you can grind as much as you want, instead of waiting for EA Sports to release ways to earn XP. There’s a lot less gating of content as a result, which is great.
Ultimate Team will live and die on how aggressively EA Sports pushes players towards the store to spend real money. I’m under no illusions that they won’t do that to some degree, but last year was absurd. If we see 100k packs in the store on release date, or 30+ different packs in the store at one time, then we’ll know it’ll be more of the same, which takes a lot of the fun out of the mode.
FC 27’s other big new feature is The Grounds, a social-focused open world mode where you can run around completing mini-games and erm… getting haircuts. To be honest, I don’t get the appeal. It’s probably aimed at the more casual FC player, who wants to just hang out with their mates in a football setting, but the world is so bland that I’m sure there are better places to go. I expect it to die off quickly, like Volta, Rush, and other original modes have in the past, but I need more time to test it to come to a real conclusion.
My time with FC 27 so far can easily be summed up by Genarro Gattuso’s viral interview clip. It’s a mixed bag. The defensive changes are great, but they highlight the poor AI in the game, and attackers now make better runs than ever before, but the ways to score aren’t balanced at all. We’ll see how the game shakes out in the coming days and weeks, but there’s still work to be done to address all of the issues from last year’s game.
