When I first heard about EA releasing downloadable content for, our 2008 sports game of the year, FIFA 09, I have to admit, I was genuinely hyped up about it. The FIFA franchise is one of my favourite franchises and for that to be expanded on with DLC was a big thing. After I had stopped myself jumping for joy and thinking of the possibilities I actually took the time to read the press release and that’s when my excitement faded. Was my gut feeling, right or did EA pull it off again?

Finding out that EA Sports were putting out a card based gameplay option for FIFA wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for DLC. Upon hearing it was called ‘Ultimate Team’, I envisioned myself stepping into some sort of online version of the game’s manager mode, picking my team and taking on the world. Well, I guess I was half right.

The idea of Ultimate Team is to build a team through earning points and subsequently buying packs of cards to use within the game. Like many people, I was put off a little by this card based take on FIFA. Nonetheless I tried to see it as a good thing, and you know what? It is…sort of.

Obviously, as I have already pointed out, the main difference UT has to the rest of the FIFA 09 game modes is the cards. These virtual cards are divided into different categories: Players, Training, Managers, Coaches, Advanced Training, Contract, Healing, Arena, Kit and Gameplay. Each card type is also split into three main categories depending on how they stack up against other cards. You’ve got Bronze packs of cards which contain the lower ranked cards, Silver have got the middle of the road cards and so on. The better packs you’re buying, the more chance you’ve got of scoring (no pun intended) a great card.

I was surprised how well the card based system works. The guys at EA Sports have put a lot into this to make it as good and as fully featured as they could. One of the largest examples of this is the ability to trade cards with other players around the world. It works sort of like eBay. Players can bid on other players cards with the coins they’ve earned from playing matches. Auctions can take some time, so you might want to wait until the last second to try and grab the card you want. There is a ‘buy it now’ option on many cards but this is not used, usually, when it comes to the higher level cards.

The card based stuff aside; the game is purely FIFA 09. When it comes to matches there have been no changes. The game plays as well as it did before and, thankfully, the dev team didn’t decide to do something stupid that would’ve ruined the experience for the majority. The only difference I can see is that there is a little bit more of a reliance on the player ratings and team chemistry. Something which won’t bother FIFA veterans.

One of the best things that Ultimate Team has done is bring in a new commentary team. The Ultimate Team matches are commentated by Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend. This makes a change from the usual tones of Tyler and Gray whose voices have become somewhat of an annoyance since the game was released back in October (especially Andy Gray’s).

The one major problem I’ve had whilst playing is the opponents. The majority of UT takes place online against opponents around the world. This is a great idea in theory and, for the most part, it works really well. Although, having someone ‘rage quit’ on you mid game because you’re trouncing them is really a pain in the arse. A simple solution to this would be to allow the player to play the remainder of the game against an A.I. opponent, an oversight that could cost EA in the long run.

Overall, I feel that Ultimate Team is a worthy expansion to FIFA 09. I just feel that a full online manager mode similar to, but not on the same scale as, Football Manager Live would do really well with the FIFA community and I think that’s what they were expecting. The new mode does a lot of good things and I can definitely see it being included in FIFA 10 this year.

EA have provided a five game trial of the new game mode and I urge anyone to try it out and see what they think. I think this is something that FIFA fans will definitely like, but I’ve just got this feeling it could’ve been so much more than it was. I do applaud EA for trying something like this, it was a ballsy move. Whether it’s paid off or not, I’ve no clue.

7.5

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