The humble opinion of a returning player

I am a returning player. The last game I played was FIFA 16 on the PS3. Recently, I finally bought a PS5 and decided to start playing again, and I must say that I now understand why this game has received so much criticism over the years.

I am truly shocked to see that this latest game is incredibly worse than the ones I played nearly 10 years ago (FIFA 15 and FIFA 16). From gameplay mechanics to clumsy and non-user-friendly menus and saving options, the experience has been disappointing.

Starting with saving options and menus, back in the day, you could easily save a lot of personal customizations for your controller settings. This feature was important to me because I usually play this game with my brother, and we have different control preferences. For example, I prefer using the directional pad instead of the analog stick to control players in football games, which I know is a bit unusual. On PS3 games, all you had to do was adjust the controller settings to your preferences and save them in one of the many available slots. It didn’t matter whether you were using controller 1 or 2; your custom preferences were always there, regardless of the mode you were playing.

Now, only one custom profile is available when selecting a team. This means I either have to play using a secondary account created just for the second controller or fix the controller preferences every time we start a game. While the main menu allows multiple custom profiles to be saved, these preferences do not appear when starting a game. Only "Custom A" is available, rendering this feature useless.

On a related note, the team management system is baffling. For example, when I want to switch my team’s formation from 4-4-2 to 3-4-3 before a match against my brother, I can’t simply make the change. I have to open the tactics menu, and my brother has to do the same, even if he doesn’t want to change anything. He then has to wait until I’m finished before continuing to adjust his players.

I thought perhaps managing the teams via the main menu would allow me to save changes in a free slot like in older games. However, after creating and naming a tactic, I discovered that it doesn’t appear in Quick Match. To my disbelief, the only solution was to use the code generated after creating the tactic. This method works, but it still requires both players to open the tactics menu, insert the code, and assign a name to the tactic every single time. Why overcomplicate things?  I mean, even the games on the PS2 had a simple and vastly more effective way to manage your team. Back then, you could freely assign player positions, define attack and defense roles, and save these changes in multiple slots for quick access.

In regards to gameplay the biggest issue is defending, which has also been unnecessarily altered. Why is L2 the main defensive button now? Why do modern games insist on overusing trigger buttons? Approaching the opponent with X and tackling with Square was perfect—both buttons were close together and intuitive to use. While you can still send defenders toward the ball with X, they rush wildly, whereas holding L2 makes them approach awkwardly slow, leaving attackers with an easy advantage.

I thought I could fix this by swapping the functions of L2 and X to at least mimic the old games. However, doing so also changes their functions in attack, meaning I would have to pass with L2! This inconsistency is frustrating, especially since other buttons don’t share this restriction. For instance, you can assign Circle to both shoot and slide tackle, and Square to both cross and tackle.

I know this is a long text, but I am deeply disappointed with this game. I waited years to play this game again. My brother and I even competed locally on FIFA 15 and 16 and did well, so we were excited about playing this one competitively. However, it is far worse than the games I enjoyed a decade ago. I haven’t even mentioned the bugs, such as defenders standing idle after a goalkeeper save while attackers chase the ball.

Unfortunately, my brother and I have concluded that EA is no longer interested in improving gameplay or leveraging modern console capabilities. Instead, the focus is entirely on UT, and as long as people keep spending money on cards, the quality of critical aspects of the game will continue to be ignored. Even the menus and saving system in this game are a disaster.

Since I bought this game on PSN and can’t get a refund, I’ll keep it and play occasionally. However, I’m definitely going to give one of the other two football games a try pretty soon.