It’s FIFA 17. What can be said about it that hasn’t been said already? It’s a sports game; move on.
Actually, the inclusion of “The Journey”, FIFA 17’s career mode, is really intriguing. Similar to NBA 2K’s MyCareer, you take a young, raw prospect named Alex Hunter and rise him up the ranks, from scholastic play to the amateur ranks, all the way to the Premier League. It’s the one aspect of titles like MLB The Show and NBA 2K that I can get behind.
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The Journey, however, wants to be more cinematic. You control Hunter through more than just games; you control his decisions off the pitch via interactive cutscenes. This approach is meant to give players the ability to make decisions for Hunter, shaping his career via dialogue decisions as well as on-pitch play. It wants to be a story mode in a sports game more than anything. As you choose what to say during the interactive parts, you watch how your decisions affect Hunter’s life and career. Your play opens up further dialogue options based on your skill.
It seems like a stilted way of providing a career mode. The NBA 2K series’ MyCareer mode is much more open-ended, letting you customize everything about your prospect and his focusing purely on the game aspects. It is, after all, a sports game, and you would think it would be about playing the sport. FIFA 17’s approach seems more restrictive and prefers you get invested in a single character as you guide him from the bottom to the top, rather than make something more in line with your imagination.
One thing that can be said in My Journey’s favor is that the visuals are impressive. FIFA 17 turns to the Frostbite engine for the first time for its graphical shininess. The engine, used in other EA titles like Star Wars: Battlefront and Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, is quite the looker, and the cutscenes pop with great visual fidelity. Whether that will be enough to sway people to try The Journey more remains to be seen.
Apart from that, there is really nothing else to FIFA 17 that is new. You still have Ultimate Team; you still have club, league and international play; and you still have the attack-heavy, finesse gameplay that FIFA 17 is known for.
When it’s big news that you can see Premier League managers on the sidelines, you can safely say there is nothing else in FIFA 17 worth talking about.
