It’s sad that just a few months after EA Sports finally got their long running Fifa series back on track they pump out a frosted, icing-coated piece of shit like Fifa Street. It’s especially frustrating when the other Street games are either great (NBA Street 2), good (NBA Street V3) or at the very least mediocre (NFL Street). The idea of a ‘Street’ style soccer game is one that I find quite appealing. I have fond memories of the indoor soccer mode in Fifa RTWC 98, and a 2005 update would have done quite nicely. Unfortunately, Fifa Street has all the signs of a half-assed rush job that really isn’t even worth a rental.

Graphically the game looks a lot like NBA Street in terms of the player models and the courts…er….I mean pitches. The player models have the same exaggerated musculature that you see in NBA Street, and most of them are easily recognizable due to the fact that the models are so large and that there are only four per team. The courts/pitches are mediocre in terms of details, they range from an asphalt soccer ‘court’ in Marseille to a modified basketball court in New York City, to a street square in Lagos. All of the pitches/courts share the same size (roughly about a third of a regular football field) and the fact that the ball can’t go out of bounds means there are walls surrounding the field of play. There are no environment specific details that might alter gameplay and there are no changes in weather or day/night so, for example, the NYC pitch is always played at night and the Lagos pitch is always played during the day.

The full list of available pitches is as follows;

It’s disappointing that there isn’t much detail in each of the pitches, there are few, if any spectators, and not much going on in the background. The courts come off looking like those from the first NBA Street and are a far cry from the excellent courts in NBA Street V3. Speaking of NBA Street V3, one area where Fifa Street doesn’t do too poorly are the camera angles – you get the obligatory close, medium and far – and they’re all pretty functional, rather than the asinine default camera angle in NBA Street V3.

The quasi-TV-style presentation is pretty sparse, you don’t get much in the way of a pre-match build up, there’s no individual player introductions, no sweeping views of the match venue, nothing. Post-match you get to see a buffed up Michael Owen (who looks like he’s been hanging out with Jose Canseco too long) shake hands with a similarly ripped Kanu and that’s about it – no post-match highlites (odd especially since many matches are ‘first to five goals wins’), nothing.

Post-goal and on-demand replays are plenty however, and it’s here you get to see Fifa Street’s animations which range from the sublime to the choppy, but all the while illustrating the game’s magnetic ball physics that are ripped straight out of every Fifa game from 2000 to 2004. As you can imagine Fifa street features several over-the-top showboating moves that would make Christiano Ronaldo blush – everything from the simple flicking the ball up and over an opposing player (imagine that in a game bearing the ‘Fifa’ name, eh?) to moves that would likely take me a paragraph to describe and would also likely land me in hospital if I tried them in real life. And while some of these are done very well, the aforementioned flick-up and over has been refined over more than 7 years of featuring in Fifa games, the others are hampered by the fact that the ball is under the influence of an invisible force-field surrounding each player.

It’s not unusual (sing it, Tom!) to see a ball flicked up in the air, traveling away from a player’s foot, suddenly veer backwards in mid-air then gain height (moving straight up, vertically) to get that same player’s chest. Shit, I knew Ronaldinho had some sick skills but that’s some crazy backspin Seabiscuit has going on….

Chopping is also far too common and just screams out the fact that this game was rushed out the door. I’ve seen the ball go straight through players, phantom limbs go through opposing players and walls – it’s all rather messy.

In the audio department Fifa Street is similarly mediocre. There’s a decent selection of dance and latin tracks, and while I find the British announcer hilarious (imagine Kieron Dyer after a few pints mixed with Ali G – ‘reeeeeeespect!’) his schtick gets old quickly and I assume most people would find him annoying from the get go. I couldn’t find an option to put my own custom Xbox soundtrack into the game and after a few hours I had muted the game and was listening to polka on my stereo.

In terms of options, you’ve got an exhibition match-mode, a mode in which you can create your own custom stacked team (word is Roman Abramovich likes this mode a lot), a little training video and a career mode. The exhibition mode allows you to use international teams and your custom-created Chelsea side. The roster of included international teams is as follows;

Each team has around 7 or 8 players which may not seem like much but the matches are only 4 vs 4 (three outfield players plus a goalie) – and there are no substitutions! The overall player ratings are a bit silly - Trezuget is rated 57/100, Crespo is a startling 38/100 while Deco (who must be on the programming team) is 95/100. Fortunately (or maybe not), the ratings largely mean sweet fuck-all – but more on that in a bit.

The career mode is like that in the other ‘Street’ games, you create your own player, sign a bunch of mediocre players (I picked Paddy Kenny, Claus Jensen, Matt Holland and Frankie Hedjuk) and then play other teams (which have a mixture of players from different nationalities) earning points to unlock other players, venues and eventually earning the title of the best ‘street’ soccer team in the world.

Okay, so onto the gameplay. Now I’m not going to be an ass (or at least not more of an ass than I usually am) and expect this to be a simulation of the beautiful game. Of course, I went in expecting over-the-top action, high scoring and a generally arcade soccer experience. As I said before I really enjoyed the indoor football mode in Fifa RTWC 98 and was hoping for something along those lines. Unfortunately, Fifa Street’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t really represent the game of soccer in any way shape or form. It’s as if the developers took an early build of the first NBA Street, tacked on soccer players, added the worst parts of Fifa 2000-Fifa 2004 and rushed it out the door. The gameplay consists of kicking the shit out of an opposing player to win the ball (there are no refs, so no rules – remember this iz da street, man, respeckt!), then performing asinine and unnecessary tricks and passes to build up your combo meter and then unleashing a gamebreaker shot that beats the keeper.

Passing and player movement don’t mean shit because the probability of a scoring chance being successful is strictly down to a combination of blind luck and how many party tricks you do before you shoot. There’s something terribly wrong with a soccer game when the most successful way to score on a 2 on 0 break (that’s two forwards versus the goalie) is NOT to draw the keeper out with one player and pass it across the net to the open player to tap it in (which won’t work because the goalie will dive across like Superman and save it), it’s to do the following;

[commentary provided by Martin Tyler and Andy Gray]

Tyler: “Oh, Brazil have a two on oh break, it’s Ronaldo and Kaka versus David James!”

“Wait a minute, Ronaldo stops on the ball, he starts walking on the ball! What is he doing?”

“England’s defense is sauntering back while Ronaldo continues to do tricks on the ball! David James is watching, mesmerized!”

‘Ronaldo stops, oh he shoots -no! Instead he flicks the ball up in the air to Kaka!”

“Kaka heads it back to Ronaldo”

“Ronaldo heads it back to Kaka”

“Kaka heads it back to Ronaldo”

“Ronaldo heads it back to Kaka”

“The England defenders are just watching!” (okay, maybe this part is realistic)

“Kaka heads it back to Ronaldo”

“Ronaldo BICYCLE KICKS it back to Kaka – on concrete!”

“Kaka bicycle kicks it back to Ronaldo!”

“Ronaldo controls it on his chest, turns, kicks it off the wall and the ball rebounds back in the air to Kaka who…”

“Heads it right back to Ronaldo”

“Wait, what’s that sound?”

Gray:  “Ehhhh, that’s the Gaiiime Brrreeeaker sound Martin!”

            “Go on you beauty!”

Tyler:    “Ronaldo heads it back to Kaka”

“OH AND KAKA TURNS AND SHOULDERS, yes, ‘shoulders’ the ball into the England goal from 10 yards out!

Gray:    “Oh, that flew like a bullet Martin! And it was right off his shoulder!”

Of course, when you check the replay of the goal you’ll see that the ball either went through James’ hand, or was about 3cm away from him – whereas that pass across the goal and subsequent shot would see James pull off a Gordon Banks-esque save with the slightest of ease. And, wouldn’t you know it, these kind of two versus the goalie breaks are the norm because the computer (and your teammate) AI is absolutely brain dead! They don’t cover back on defense, they don’t mark up and they don’t get open for passes (which I guess is just as well since it wouldn’t matter anyway). The keepers are also brain dead - coming out of goal randomly but never when it’s warranted (like to close down an attacker on a breakaway or to collect an errant pass when the rest of the team is at the other end).

The special trick moves work 90% of the time and always leave opposing players frozen while the animation completes it’s cycle – there’s just no sense of satisfaction or skill when playing this game, and most damning of all – it just isn’t fun. Pass and move is the essence of soccer, even if it is ‘street’ soccer and yet somehow EA Sports BIG didn’t get that memo.

This game is an absolute disaster – don’t go near it with a ten foot pole.

Lavan Chandran