Let’s all be honest with ourselves - EA FC 26 is terribly bad.

 

I am going to outline some points below in which I believe makes this year’s game horrible to play. Feel free to give your opinions on these points as well, as I’m genuinely curious to see if anyone else is on the same wavelength as me. Keep in mind these are my own opinions from playing the game quite a bit since early access launched. I’ll also add that I’m a Division 5 player on Ultimate Team - offline I play Legendary. Nothing special by any means, just a casual player.

1). Defending: 

This year, defending and the point I’ll detail in point 2 of this list are the main factors as to why this game is so terrible to play. If you’re left-stick dribbling, it is impossible to win the ball from an opponent. It just seems like the speed of tackling animations is too slow to handle the dribbling animations. Rarely am I able to time a tackle perfectly and win the ball cleanly and fairly. Vice-versa if I’m on the attack, as all I need to do is some tiki taka passing and left-stick dribbling to be through on goal. AI defending is equally as bad, with defenders making alien runs tracking back nowhere near the passage of play, leaving players wide open to receive a pass. Does anyone else get that weird animation when committing a defender to a challenge, the attacker can manage to get past, but your defender is trapped in a force field (like 2 opposing sides of a magnet) and can’t not within a yard of the player?

2). Too many goals:

I don’t think I’ve played a game of UT this year which didn’t have a minimum of 8 goals. I had a Rivals game end 11-9 yesterday (I will attach the proof)… 20 goals in one game of FIFA? Come on man. It is way too “arcade-y”. Pass, dribble, shoot, score. On repeat. Is anyone like me that enjoys a well fought, well defended 1-0 or even a 0-0 which is hard to split? I understand it’s not meant to be super realistic, but the amount of goals, whether nicely worked or just plain BS, makes this game so boring and predictable.

3). Goalkeepers:

Where do I start with goalkeepers, man? Again, I don’t think EA nailed the goalkeeper animations this year.  Any keeper without the ‘footwork’ play style? Good luck getting anywhere near a low-driven, or for that matter, any shot aimed below the belt line. I feel like one game, your keeper can feel like a prime Buffon, then the next can’t get a hand to anything that comes his way. I think this has to tie in with the high scoring model for UT, which EA seem to be promoting and not willing to change. Very frustrating. Even the goalkeeper save / deflection animations are way off, like when a keeper saves a pretty tame shot and it ends up flying into row Z at a million miles per hour. 

4). Kick off goals:

Yeah, I’ll leave it at that. 

5). Patches:

This one I’m most interested in to hear your different opinions on. I just feel like you can play the game for a while and get used to the way it plays, but when a patch or a gameplay update is released, it feels like a brand new, totally different version of the game. Nothing ever feels the same and is drastically different to what you’ve been used to for the previous however long of playing, so you need to spend ages trying to figure out how to adapt as the change feels so drastic. To me, it feels more like an overhaul of changes, rather than subtle tweaks to genuinely improve the gameplay experience. Formations and custom tactics take the biggest hit for me with this one, and a full rebuild is required almost always.

[CM edit - formatting]