Review: FIFA 2008

I’m not going to lie to you, I know almost nothing about football well I know the bits I need to know like the names of the teams, and yes I do support a team Liverpool but this isn’t a bio of me now is it? This is about the newly released FIFA 2008 for the N-Gage 2.0 Platform.

First Impressions? Good graphically, Nice clean menus, good array of teams to select from and good customisation. My thoughts soon changed from “ooooo” to “hmm” read on….

To begin with the menus are nice and clean, there simple to navigate around but I don’t know if its just the device but the menus did seem to lag a bit, or didn’t recognise the key I pressed but that may just be a small issue. At first it asks you to have the sound on or off, and the layout of the screen (Portrait or Landscape) personally choose Portrait wont look as good, but at least the controls work which I cant say works very well when in Landscape.

On the main menu we have “Quick Match” which is basically instantly into the game choose your team and done nothing else to manage, then you have “Game Modes” which consists off “Kick Off”, “Challenges”,” Season” and “Tournaments” – Which is a good collection of modes making it rather deep.

My FIFA menu is just all the settings, its best here to re-do you game keys to make sure its suited for you.

When playing, I was blown away with the graphics – There not special, but they certainly look nice on the devices. The graphics being clear, 3D animations which do look nice for a phone game.

The sound of the game is nice too – Some good music along with the In-Game sounds of the crowd cheering and the football hitting every foot makes it closer to the Home console version and as far away from a mobile game.

The multiplayer aspect is ruined, a FIFA game isn’t FIFA without multiplayer – You can’t play locally together, or even over the N-Gage Arena network which is a shame. All we have for any sort of multiplayer activity is N-Gage Arena Rankings once again, and I like rankings I do but we need Real Time play too.

This is what ruined the game for me, The controls. To put it simply which quite of people will hate me for is, There terrible, rubbish – horrendous. You have it in Landscape and you don’t have enough buttons to do everything, and its all in “Press 5 to shoot etc” but soon as you put it in portrait you have enough keys but then its just not nice to play pressing all those keys but the funny thing is (Might just be mine?) but in portrait it changes from “Press 5 to shoot etc” to “Press the A button” etc I don’t know if its just me but it certainly does it.

Overall, EA put some effort in – but I cant say they fully completed it, I think so many improvements could be added and for a “2 MB” Size you can tell it isn’t going to be so great already, but for a overall football experience buy this you wont regret it, just redo all those keys. Let’s hope EA Listen and improve for FIFA 2009.