EA Sports FC 27 review – A new low

Last year, when I reviewed EA Sports FC 26, I gave the game three stars out of five.

I felt that, while EA was taking steps in the right direction, those steps were rather too small, with Ultimate Team's monetisation remaining an unfortunate blight on the game.

My plea was simple: spend more time upgrading the gameplay and less time rummaging around in my wallet.

In making EA Sports FC 27, EA appears to have mistakenly heard the exact opposite.

On the money side, all of the monetisation that I found so grating last year is still there in spades. The main change is that EA has seen fit this year to introduce the new Ultimate Plus Edition to stores.

As if it was not mind-bogglingly greedy in and of itself to charge £139.99 for the pleasure of getting an even more extreme head start in the game's many modes, it was a pre-order exclusive, only available until the end of August to try and goad players into purchasing in fear of not missing out, which is pretty shameful to say the least.

This is normally the bit where I'd go through all the nifty gameplay changes that EA has come up with this year, but the changes this year are perhaps the most inconsequential in years.

Sure, the corners are slightly different, the AI movement has been tinkered with – I actually think this is a downgrade on last year's game – and dribbling has been tweaked all in the name of the now-yearly 'more authentic gameplay.'

But none of this does anything to fix what actually needs fixing in this game. In fact, the dribbling changes coupled with the changes to AI serve to make the gameplay feel worse than it did last year, which is some achievement.

The same meta dominates this year's game, as it did last year and in the year before.

Pace is abused to no end, players with ridiculously high dribbling stats litter the game, providing attacking gameplay that is as finicky and unenjoyable to use as it is to play against.

Every match slowly melds into one. The same players, the same formations, the same tactics. We may as well just be simulating all these games.

With such a marked lack of gameplay changes, EA's hopes are clearly hinged upon their newest game mode: The Grounds.

On paper, The Grounds introduces exactly what players have wanted for years.

A brand-new game mode, the answer to NBA 2K's 'The City,' giving players the option to explore a footballing world full of mini-games while developing your player and earning items for Clubs – sounds great, right?

In practice, my impression of The Grounds is that EA must have seen the popularity of The City and picked up their own knock-off at a petrol station on the way home.

The world itself, while pretty, is dull to explore, and while the mini-games available to play are quick and inoffensive, they come off more as reskins of discarded game modes of old than something players will be engaging with for more than a week after launch.

Nobody really liked Volta, so it was remade into Rush. Rush was then forced upon us via Objectives in Ultimate Team, and now Rush-adjacent small-sided games are back again in a marginally different form alongside basketball hoops and the like.

As a FIFA Street lover, it pains me to see what passes for EA's street football offering nowadays, made all the more baffling by the existence of Rematch, a truly great arcade football experience that released last year – if a small studio like Sloclap can do it, why can't EA?

A small joy is that Kylian Mbappé has seemingly done his own incredibly stilted voice acting, which is surprisingly endearing for a megastar that's often, perhaps unjustly piled upon.

The Grounds is a luxury game mode. It's the kind of thing you add in when everything else is great, and you want to give the players something new to play around with as a treat.

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But while players have so many complaints about the state of the game, adding in something like this while leaving the state of the game effectively unchanged from last year smacks of a totally misguided developer.

What baffles me even more about The Grounds as a choice for a new game mode is that it stars Alex Hunter, our hero from FIFA 18 and 19's The Journey mode, as a mentor of sorts.

Seeing as The Journey is perhaps the only new mode since Pro Clubs back in FIFA 11 to receive players' seal of approval, the choice to acknowledge its existence in such a way without actually ever continuing it makes no sense to me.

Now, every year when these issues arrive, the developers get plenty of flak – that they're bad at their jobs or don't care about the game, and I want to defend them.

Every EA FC dev I have ever met is supremely passionate about both football and EA FC.

It suggests to me that EA FC is kept afloat by talented developers making high-quality assets and game modes, but who are routinely let down by those above them, making decisions that never seem to leave anyone happy.

For the last however many years, every FC game has been basically the same on the gameplay front.

Little tweaks to the AI or more realistic animations are all well and good, but when every game defaults to the same tactics, the same strategies of abusing pace and dribbling, the only outcome is a game that is inherently stale.

Clubs is basically the same. Career Mode got its customary couple of new features. But these are all largely inconsequential.

If a free-to-play game went this long without any meaningful changes, players would complain.

Look at ARC Raiders. A £40 game that released not even a year ago whose community is up in arms at the lack of content over the course of mere months, not years.

Now imagine a game that has barely changed its core gameplay for years, but also charges its players £60-£70 a year to play it.

That charges you £100, really, if you want to be competitive with everyone else who has spent £100 to get a head start on you. Or £140, because that old head start doesn't go far enough anymore.

And on top of that, you'll want to make sure you buy the in-game Season Passes too – don't want you falling behind throughout the season, do we?

What I originally wrote next read that, deep down, I love EA FC. But that's not true. I love, or rather loved, FIFA.

That's the game I grew up playing in my bedroom. That I spent nights at uni playing with my housemates. That once gave me a feeling of accomplishment when I packed a big player in Ultimate Team that I had earned, not just bought.

Not to be all 'old man yells at cloud' here, but do you remember when your first Ultimate Team squad was a mishmash of Bronze and Silver players with a couple of Golds? The struggle to earn those first Packs made it feel like a genuine achievement.

This year, before I've even played a match, I've got two-time Ballon d'Or winner Karl-Heinz Rummenigge leading the line. What are we doing here, folks?

FIFA used to be so much more than the overly monetised husk that EA now uses to bleed its fans dry every September.

In the last few years, I've still played EA FC, but my interest wanes with each instalment, and that's a sentiment I see echoed by much of its player base.

There's a reason why so many people are currently replaying Career Mode in FIFA games from a decade ago, or modding PES 2021 to within an inch of its life.

Indeed, the era of great football games appears to be over.

I hope EA Sports FC can redeem itself in the years to come, but for me, the way EA continues to eschew meaningful gameplay changes in favour of increasingly insatiable monetisation means I've all but lost hope that the FIFA I once knew will ever be coming back.

FC 27 releases on 25 September.

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