A longtime Electronic Arts flagship title ends up on the Playstation, but
does it have what it takes to be a great game?

The FIFA-series is well known within the gaming community as one fourth
of EA's 'dream team' sports games line-up that made EA Sports the
dominating 16-bit sports developer. But eventually a game will become
outdated if it isn't totally re-designed. With the arrival of 32-bit
CD-ROM platforms EA better start paying better attention to detail,
otherwise they'll have to play catch up instead of being the market
leader.

FIFA SOCCER 96 has a smashing intro, but who really cares? The manual
and the game are in several languages, notably English, German, French,
Italian and Swedish. The problem, at least with the Swedish part, is that
the translation isn't very well done. But nevertheless I like the
initiative.

As usual you can play friendlies, tournaments and there's a bunch of
leauges to win if you want to spend many hours on the game. You can
change the gameplay between 'arcade' and 'simulation' and the
difficulty-setting is either 'semi-pro' or 'pro'. Ok, it makes a
difference, but not as much as I'd like.

Once you've mastered the controls the game's fairly easy, even with
settings 'simulation' and 'pro'. With longball-tactics and a decent team
that shoots well you'll win the very majority of the games. Just shoot a
spin ball and about 75% of the good shots will score. This is really
annoying as it isn't realistic. It makes the goalies appear very sloppy.
And another major let down is that the goalies can't run backwards. Instead,
when they have to re-position themself, they turns his back at an attacker,
even if he is in the box with the ball! Come on EA, this should've been
picked up during quality assuarance.

One minor thing that I dislike is that camera and team strategy settings
aren't saved along with other information on the memory card. When playing
a league the table isn't constantly accessible nor can you return
to the main menu at any given point. This makes the league cycle (play
a game, save the results, see the table, simulating other results, play
again) far from ideal. On the other hand I can accept EA dropping
individual statistics in order to keep the size of the save file down.

The camera angles are ok, atleast some of them. They don't give you
total control nor good overview but the ability to score spectacular
goals. The trade off gameplay vs graphics is acceptable. But a
'place the camera yourself'-option and a bird perspective (a'la
SENSIBLE SOCCER and KICK OFF) would've been nice.

As a one player game FIFA SOCCER 96 is a stable football title. Quite
realistic and fun and lots of teams to play. Compared to SENSIBLE
SOCCER it's much easier to dribble and control the ball, but the gameplay
isn't as fluid. Something that isn't my cup of tea is the cartoonistic
clips that get played at the information board when something happens
(a goal, offside etc). It harms the gameplay. On the other hand, there
should've been an automatic replay-option. Overall this isn't a
revolutionary but an above average one-player game.

FIFA SOCCER 96 is a two-player game, that's for sure. Trashing a friend
or playing incredibly tough games is really funny. The only problem is
that the Sony controller isn't very forgiving to your left-hand thumb,
it'll eventually hurt.

Trying to give an honest and fair opinion I say that FIFA SOCCER 96
is a good game, not a great one. This version isn't very polished and
the designerns have overlooked important things. But, maybe I'm just being
picky as, overall, FIFA SOCCER 96 is one of the best football games I've
played.

(c)1996 Henrik Torstensson . 
Non-commercial distribution encouraged.