Real leagues from around the fifa 15 coins world, real teams, and real players really do make a difference. Not everyone is a die hard European fan, so it is nice to have proper international team rosters or, ghasp, Major League Soccer teams to play with for the rest of us. As far as modes go, FIFA 13 has Be a Pro as a regular player or a goalkeeper, beefy career modes for players and or managers, and the FIFA Ultimate Team card game. New this year is a set of skill test minigames that can actually be rather addictive and fun to play through and these minigames also appear in the loading sequence before matches.
Last year in my FIFA 12 review I complained that I was tired of the "practice on the loading screen" feature, but the new skill games make it interesting again, so kudos to EA Canada for that. You’ll also find a wealth of online modes, online leagues, online clubs with your friends, and much more. An interesting and very welcome new feature is that the game will regularly update with new stats for teams and players based on how they perform in real life, just like the NBA Today feature in the NBA 2K series, for example. All in all there are a ton of features in FIFA 13, and while many modes have seen only moderate tweaks and improvements, you can’t argue with the sheer volume of it all.
The Xbox 360 version of the game also has optional Kinect voice commands, but they don’t really add that much. They are definitely useful when you learn how to use them since you can make substitutions, change formations, or alter attacking style, but aren’t anything earth shattering. My personal favorite feature is the huge number of sliders and customization options you have access to so you can change the game to play however you want. It is pretty darn good at default settings, don’t get me wrong, but if you want to ignore pesky fouls, speed things up, or make the CPU play a little differently, you’ll have plenty of options and more to set things up the way you want. The core gameplay builds on the improvements introduced in last year’s www.eafifa15.com game, namely player collisions and the new defense system.