FIFA Street

Review - Soccer samba or football folly, Sam kicks-off...

Another day, another EA Sports game. Soon scientists will be able to ditch the decay of caesium atoms and base all time measurement on EA Sports' release schedule. Notorious for pumping out a new FIFA title every 56 days, some genius at EA came up with the Streets brand of sporting games. These are basically the same vapid cash-cows as the proper sports games but radically simplified and then restyled into an urban theme so as to capture the 10-16 year old market. Somewhere along the way the essence of the sports these Street games purport to emulate has been radically altered, leaving gamers with fully branded and licensed sports titles that are more akin to Dance Dance Revolution than the World Cup.

FIFA Street is ostensibly four-a-side football played out in a variety of urban settings like dust pitches in Rio to skate parks in Marseilles. Five-a-side has sporadically made an appearance as an extra football games. Here it is reduced by a man and tricked it out into a full price standalone game. If there was nothing more to the game than FIFA 2005 with seven men stripped out and tarmac replacing grass, then interest would dwindle quicker than your libido after a come on from Janet Street Porter. So FIFA Street takes the trick style approach, with more buttons on the controller being assigned to performing flashy moves than kicking the actual ball. The right thumbstick is the trick-stick which you wiggle in a random fashion in combination with trigger and button presses in the hope that some useful chain of moves will build up in the combo meter, racking up trick points until you get enough to light up the Gamebreaker feature. Common to the Street series of games, the Gamebreaker is basically a super-powerful shot which is most likely to go in the back of the net.

Now maybe there is some method to this flashy trick business, but the very brief non-interactive tutorial film remained coy on any of the specific moves and the lack of a manual left this reviewer floundering away at the joypad more in hope than control. It is satisfying when your team manages to bounce the ball between their heads a few successive times before passing it on to your striker who does a backwards bicycle kick to bury the ball in the back of the net. However, when this happened it often seemed in direct contravention of the commands I thought that I had passed onto my players. And here we come to the first of a multitude of problems which plague FIFA Street. I never really felt in full control of my players. They seemed more concerned with doing their own thing, which often seemingly involved inspecting the graffiti on the walls for tags they recognise. During dead ball situations it's not infrequent for all the players to stand stock-still like they are engaged in a mass impromptu impersonation of statues. As the same thing can happen when the ball is shooting around the tiny pitch, I often found myself hurling the worst abuse at my players that any virtual footballer has had to endure in my may years of playing football games.

Your team-mates will try to stick to their man like glue, even for a few crucial milliseconds after you assume control. Otherwise they have absolutely no initiative and will saunter around the pitch as if they were trying to figure out how to how to solve Fermat's last theorem using nothing but a twig and sprinkle of salt. Intelligence is not a word often associated with the real game of football: intelligence is nowhere to be seen in your virtual players. Even selecting them manually is a chore with control often going to a man off-screen before that vital defender. Direction changes also tend to present huge obstacles. It's as if the momentum system from the full FIFA game has been lifted straight into Street with no alterations made for a pitch that is about a tenth the size of normal. So what should have been a reasonable amount of distance to turn on a full grass pitch is ridiculously lengthy here, with your player getting round to running in the right direction a full second after the opposing player has screamed past them. In fact, I would imagine that very little tweaking has been done to the underlying football mechanics other than ramming in some behavioural code from an NHL or NBA game.

The skill of your starting players in Rule the Street is so low that it can take them over a second to get up after a tumble, and their ability to string together combos is so poor that it takes an age to accrue the Skill Bills which are the game's currency. The fact that even the earliest opposing goalie has a skill of 30, (the player's will be around 11-13) gives a big hint at the sort of cheats going on to make the game work at all. There's also not much finesse to this game. The tiny size of the pitch leaves little scope for actual football. The tricks can lead to some amusing moments, but as success in the match and especially the campaign is so reliant on racking up huge trick scores the dexterity required by the control system is obscene. For example, to pull off a fancy high pass you have to hold down the left trigger, press the B button and flick the right stick. I don't have that many hands. So rather than stringing together a bunch of successive passes or opening up the defence with a searing run down the wing, FIFA Street is won by pushing buttons like beat-em ups are going out of style.