Benj
23/Apr/08, 07:38 PM
For anyone who's interested. I was bored and fancied writing something:
Has it been 6 months already? EA’s twice yearly release of a football game is something you could set your watch by these days and this time around is no different. Whether it’s the Champions League, World Cup or in this case the European Championships there is always a halfway point between the latest iterations of the FIFA series, this usually consists of a few tweaks to the game engine, maybe a slight graphical upgrade and a lot less teams to play with. Euro 2008 however bucks this trend as it has some pretty significant and innovative steps forward for football games.
Let’s start off with the engine itself, it is a tweaked version of the FIFA 08 engine, it looks pretty much identical but there are some changes to game play. The most significant of these is to passing and shooting, the very simple act of moving the power bar to above the players’ head, rather than having it tucked away in the corner of the screen, makes judging how much weight you’re putting on shots and long passes much, much easier. It is also now shown when you’re making short passes with A as well, a tap of the button will pass to the player closest to you and the longer you hold it down the more players you’ll miss out as you make longer passes along the ground. This was something that was present in FIFA 08 however it is much easier judge now that the power bar is displayed.
There are plenty of little niggles which have been removed. A major problem I had with FIFA 08 was with the goalkeepers never actually coming out for the ball until just before the attacker got there, thankfully this appears to have been remedied in Euro 2008 with keepers coming straight for the ball when you hold Y. Movement is a lot smoother, particularly when you’re trying to turn players at speed, unlike in FIFA 08 where it felt like you were controlling a team of elephants at times, players are much more realistically able to turn whilst running at speed, making defending a fair bit easier.
Unfortunately not everything has been fixed, just as playing as a team outside the top leagues in FIFA 08 meant all your players had the football know-how of your average American and the overweight slowness to boot, playing as one of the traditionally lower-ability teams gives the same effect in Euro 2008. It seems like there is some sort of genetic defect in people born in San Marion of the Faeroe Islands that means they’re not actually capable of running quickly. It is perhaps a sign of a poor AI and skills system which lacks the scalability required to represent the diverse range of footballing abilities across Europe without resorting to artificial methods like making the players of poorer teams slow.
The other major addition to the game engine is that we finally have rain. It looks realistic and it’s a nice feature to have, however any time I’m given the choice I make sure it’s turned off, why? Well it’s a completely unrealistic representation of what rain does to a football pitch. Apparently not a single stadium in the game has any kind of drainage system whatsoever, water fills the pitch with massive puddles and mud patches appear in the centre circle and on the edges of the penalty areas. There is no halfway point which gives you a nice slick passing pitch, you either play on the standard dry pitch or in a bog. This might not be too bad if the ball didn’t sail through the massive puddles of water without slowing down in the slightest whilst coming to a screeching halt whenever it so much as smells a patch of mud. Have the developers ever played football? A massive accumulation of water is going to slow the ball down whereas mud is going to cause it to slide and speed up, common sense surely? That’s not to mention the fact that when it is raining the commentators will not shut up about it, you can expect a comment on the weather several times every half which has you screaming at the TV in frustration after your first game in the rain.
Also we now have controllable celebrations. By moving the analogue sticks and pressing various button combinations you can control your players celebration after scoring. It’s nice touch with good novelty value the first few times but gets old very quickly.
Moving on from the match engine, whilst offering the usual selection of game types you’d expect including friendlies, Euro 2008 mode, challenges, single online matches and online cups and leagues, there are two brand spanking new modes, Captain Your Country and Battle of the Nations.
I’ll start with Battle of the Nations, whilst not really a game mode in itself it makes the whole game a competition amongst gamers (as long as you’re connected to the EA servers). When you first start the game you have to pick a country you wish to represent in the BoN. Whenever you play a game, no matter who you play as you earn points towards your countries total, and playing as a lower ranked team against a higher ranked one will earn you more points. On the 30th June the team at the top of the leaderboard will win the Battle, whether or not this will be reset and played again after that date remains unclear. This feature suffers from the inevitable problem that nobody represents the less popular countries, at last count there were 26 of 53 countries without any score at all whilst England and France are comfortably miles ahead of everyone else. Whilst this does add a little edge to your games as you know you’re helping your country I forgot all about it whilst playing and rarely checked the standings
The big new feature is Captain Your Country mode, which gives you and either three friends or AI players the chance to play through a whole campaign, from B games and friendlies right through Euro 2008 qualifying and the finals themselves, whilst competing for captaincy of your country. All of the games are played in what is essentially Be A Pro mode from FIFA 08, where you control just your player. When starting this game mode you have the choice of either creating your own player or choosing to play as an existing player. The creation option has the usual choices for appearance and gives you a small number of exp points to spend upgrading your skills. As you play through games you earn more exp points depending on how well you play which can be spent on upgrading your players skills whether you’ve created a player or chosen to play as an existing one. This however is where CYC falls down somewhat. Playing as a midfielder or defender it’s nigh on impossible not to get a good score whereas playing as a striker, especially as a created player who starts off being fairly rubbish skills wise, is very difficult as the rating system is extremely shallow. When playing upfront if you don’t score you don’t get a good rating, you might be able to push a 7.5/10 if you get an assist but good luck getting any higher without scoring, if a midfield player and a striker both played identical games, picking up 2 assists and 0 goals the midfield player would end up with a much better score. That’s not to say the game type isn’t fun, playing with friends is a good laugh as you’re constantly trying to outdo each other but teamwork can go out the window somewhat in those situations.
These new game types count for little however because Euro 2008 is crippled with bugs. Online matches are notoriously unstable, and not just in terms of the connection. In one game me and my opponent were left staring at a post after a cut scene got stuck, with neither of us being able to do anything about it, I have had the same issue with cut scenes getting stuck at least half a dozen times in single player. After playing for a while there are horrible problems with shadows artifacting, plunging the whole pitch into square blocks of darkness as if someone has turned half the floodlights off (and before anyone asks I have a near brand new 360 Premium model with HDMI port and no issues on other games). For some reason whenever anyone makes a substitution the game insists on showing a three second camera shot panning the stadium which is un-skippable and gets on your nerves big time when you want to get on with the game.
Perhaps most shocking of all, whilst playing the groups stages of Euro 2008 in Captain Your Country mode I ended up tied for the group lead with 2 other teams on 6 points, despite having the best goal difference, most goals scored and second least conceded, I was placed in third place and knocked out. To play through all the B games, friendlies and qualifiers only to be knocked out in the finals when I shouldn’t have been is ridiculously frustrating and simply unacceptable of a AAA title.
All in all Euro 2008 is a fun game with some innovative features but has big issues with bugs. If you’re a diehard FIFA fan then you’ll probably want to get it for the game play changes but for the rest of us a lack of significant changes from FIFA 08, to make up for the less choice of teams, means you’d be much better off waiting a few months for FIFA 09, where I’d expect Captain Your Country (the only real reason to buy this game) to be present, perhaps rebranded as Captain Your Club. I’d give the game 71%.
Has it been 6 months already? EA’s twice yearly release of a football game is something you could set your watch by these days and this time around is no different. Whether it’s the Champions League, World Cup or in this case the European Championships there is always a halfway point between the latest iterations of the FIFA series, this usually consists of a few tweaks to the game engine, maybe a slight graphical upgrade and a lot less teams to play with. Euro 2008 however bucks this trend as it has some pretty significant and innovative steps forward for football games.
Let’s start off with the engine itself, it is a tweaked version of the FIFA 08 engine, it looks pretty much identical but there are some changes to game play. The most significant of these is to passing and shooting, the very simple act of moving the power bar to above the players’ head, rather than having it tucked away in the corner of the screen, makes judging how much weight you’re putting on shots and long passes much, much easier. It is also now shown when you’re making short passes with A as well, a tap of the button will pass to the player closest to you and the longer you hold it down the more players you’ll miss out as you make longer passes along the ground. This was something that was present in FIFA 08 however it is much easier judge now that the power bar is displayed.
There are plenty of little niggles which have been removed. A major problem I had with FIFA 08 was with the goalkeepers never actually coming out for the ball until just before the attacker got there, thankfully this appears to have been remedied in Euro 2008 with keepers coming straight for the ball when you hold Y. Movement is a lot smoother, particularly when you’re trying to turn players at speed, unlike in FIFA 08 where it felt like you were controlling a team of elephants at times, players are much more realistically able to turn whilst running at speed, making defending a fair bit easier.
Unfortunately not everything has been fixed, just as playing as a team outside the top leagues in FIFA 08 meant all your players had the football know-how of your average American and the overweight slowness to boot, playing as one of the traditionally lower-ability teams gives the same effect in Euro 2008. It seems like there is some sort of genetic defect in people born in San Marion of the Faeroe Islands that means they’re not actually capable of running quickly. It is perhaps a sign of a poor AI and skills system which lacks the scalability required to represent the diverse range of footballing abilities across Europe without resorting to artificial methods like making the players of poorer teams slow.
The other major addition to the game engine is that we finally have rain. It looks realistic and it’s a nice feature to have, however any time I’m given the choice I make sure it’s turned off, why? Well it’s a completely unrealistic representation of what rain does to a football pitch. Apparently not a single stadium in the game has any kind of drainage system whatsoever, water fills the pitch with massive puddles and mud patches appear in the centre circle and on the edges of the penalty areas. There is no halfway point which gives you a nice slick passing pitch, you either play on the standard dry pitch or in a bog. This might not be too bad if the ball didn’t sail through the massive puddles of water without slowing down in the slightest whilst coming to a screeching halt whenever it so much as smells a patch of mud. Have the developers ever played football? A massive accumulation of water is going to slow the ball down whereas mud is going to cause it to slide and speed up, common sense surely? That’s not to mention the fact that when it is raining the commentators will not shut up about it, you can expect a comment on the weather several times every half which has you screaming at the TV in frustration after your first game in the rain.
Also we now have controllable celebrations. By moving the analogue sticks and pressing various button combinations you can control your players celebration after scoring. It’s nice touch with good novelty value the first few times but gets old very quickly.
Moving on from the match engine, whilst offering the usual selection of game types you’d expect including friendlies, Euro 2008 mode, challenges, single online matches and online cups and leagues, there are two brand spanking new modes, Captain Your Country and Battle of the Nations.
I’ll start with Battle of the Nations, whilst not really a game mode in itself it makes the whole game a competition amongst gamers (as long as you’re connected to the EA servers). When you first start the game you have to pick a country you wish to represent in the BoN. Whenever you play a game, no matter who you play as you earn points towards your countries total, and playing as a lower ranked team against a higher ranked one will earn you more points. On the 30th June the team at the top of the leaderboard will win the Battle, whether or not this will be reset and played again after that date remains unclear. This feature suffers from the inevitable problem that nobody represents the less popular countries, at last count there were 26 of 53 countries without any score at all whilst England and France are comfortably miles ahead of everyone else. Whilst this does add a little edge to your games as you know you’re helping your country I forgot all about it whilst playing and rarely checked the standings
The big new feature is Captain Your Country mode, which gives you and either three friends or AI players the chance to play through a whole campaign, from B games and friendlies right through Euro 2008 qualifying and the finals themselves, whilst competing for captaincy of your country. All of the games are played in what is essentially Be A Pro mode from FIFA 08, where you control just your player. When starting this game mode you have the choice of either creating your own player or choosing to play as an existing player. The creation option has the usual choices for appearance and gives you a small number of exp points to spend upgrading your skills. As you play through games you earn more exp points depending on how well you play which can be spent on upgrading your players skills whether you’ve created a player or chosen to play as an existing one. This however is where CYC falls down somewhat. Playing as a midfielder or defender it’s nigh on impossible not to get a good score whereas playing as a striker, especially as a created player who starts off being fairly rubbish skills wise, is very difficult as the rating system is extremely shallow. When playing upfront if you don’t score you don’t get a good rating, you might be able to push a 7.5/10 if you get an assist but good luck getting any higher without scoring, if a midfield player and a striker both played identical games, picking up 2 assists and 0 goals the midfield player would end up with a much better score. That’s not to say the game type isn’t fun, playing with friends is a good laugh as you’re constantly trying to outdo each other but teamwork can go out the window somewhat in those situations.
These new game types count for little however because Euro 2008 is crippled with bugs. Online matches are notoriously unstable, and not just in terms of the connection. In one game me and my opponent were left staring at a post after a cut scene got stuck, with neither of us being able to do anything about it, I have had the same issue with cut scenes getting stuck at least half a dozen times in single player. After playing for a while there are horrible problems with shadows artifacting, plunging the whole pitch into square blocks of darkness as if someone has turned half the floodlights off (and before anyone asks I have a near brand new 360 Premium model with HDMI port and no issues on other games). For some reason whenever anyone makes a substitution the game insists on showing a three second camera shot panning the stadium which is un-skippable and gets on your nerves big time when you want to get on with the game.
Perhaps most shocking of all, whilst playing the groups stages of Euro 2008 in Captain Your Country mode I ended up tied for the group lead with 2 other teams on 6 points, despite having the best goal difference, most goals scored and second least conceded, I was placed in third place and knocked out. To play through all the B games, friendlies and qualifiers only to be knocked out in the finals when I shouldn’t have been is ridiculously frustrating and simply unacceptable of a AAA title.
All in all Euro 2008 is a fun game with some innovative features but has big issues with bugs. If you’re a diehard FIFA fan then you’ll probably want to get it for the game play changes but for the rest of us a lack of significant changes from FIFA 08, to make up for the less choice of teams, means you’d be much better off waiting a few months for FIFA 09, where I’d expect Captain Your Country (the only real reason to buy this game) to be present, perhaps rebranded as Captain Your Club. I’d give the game 71%.