EA Sports FC 26 Review (Xbox Series X|S)

When Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer series closed its doors in favour of a free-to-play Ultimate Team alternative called eFootball a few years ago, I have to admit I was gutted. It’s not like I didn’t play FIFA as well, but I felt like PES gave me a more authentic-feeling game of football on the pitch – it wasn’t about dancing on the ball with insane agility, over-the-top skill moves and 5-4 scorelines. PES delved into the nitty-gritty of the sport, such as playing hoof-ball when it was necessary and grinding out a 1-0 win with a messy goalmouth-scramble of a goal.

EA Sports FC just hasn’t been able to replicate that in recent years, and a lot of that is down to its over-reliance on Ultimate Team – its fans seem to want a super fast-paced and more arcadey take on the sport, so where does that leave the rest of us? Well, EA has cleverly attempted to address this in EA Sports FC 26, providing both “Competitive” and “Authentic” game styles that try to offer a more arcade and simulation-like experience.

As you can probably tell, I’ve been spending most of my time with the “Authentic” style in Manager Career, and I’m enjoying this mode more than I have in a long time. This new style slows the pace of matches considerably (especially if you’re playing in England’s League Two like I am!), allows for more random bounces and misplaced passes, and requires you to think much more carefully about how to find space and mark opposing players. There’s not a whole lot of focus on dribbling when using this preset at higher difficulty levels – it’s more about being patient and trying to open up small pockets of space, while also ensuring that your opponents are blocked from doing the same thing.

At its best, this feels so much fun to play, and I’ve found that scorelines have been very accurate overall (1-0, 1-1, 2-1, etc.) when playing on Legendary with six-minute halves. I’ve been getting that addictive “one more game” feel that FIFA and EA Sports FC haven’t delivered for me in years, and I can’t tell you how great it is to be able to say that!

However, it’s certainly not all perfect, as I feel like the Frostbite engine still can’t deal with certain things – AI teammates can feel too static and don’t make enough appropriate runs, crossing and long-ball tactics still feel mostly ineffective, and AI positioning in general still doesn’t feel quite right at times. It’s definitely more “authentic” and plays a much more enjoyable game of football for a simulation purist like myself, but there’s certainly room for improvement as well.

I do love the sense of freshness that the authentic style brings this year, whereas I can’t say as much about the standard competitive style – it’s perfectly fine, but just very familiar. Going from one to the other feels utterly ludicrous at first – the pace of Ultimate Team is insane and takes some getting used to! I used to be a big FUT devotee and think it’s still just as good as ever in FC 26, especially when you factor in some of the new features like the Live Events, but it’s also pretty much what you’d expect at this point. Lots of arcade-like fun, a ridiculous number of things to do, and packed with so much potential for rage quitting. That’s just Ultimate Team for you.

For what it’s worth, they say that they’ve added “more responsive dribbling, smarter AI positioning, and sharper, more explosive movement” in EA Sports FC 26 this year, and you definitely feel the dribbling and movement when using the competitive style, while the goalkeepers probably feel like the biggest upgrade to me – again, most of my time has been with the authentic style, but they’ve behaved very naturally and made some really impressive saves.

And as for the modes, as I say, Ultimate Team is very much the same beast with some refreshed elements for the likes of Rivals and Champions, Manager Career feels pleasantly exhaustive at this point with a new Live Challenges feature that can throw up some interesting scenarios as time goes on, and to be honest I haven’t even touched Clubs yet – but apparently they’ve added some cool stuff like alternate rules and dynamic Live Events to that mode too.

Conclusion

All in all, while EA Sports FC 26 isn’t perfect by any means, I commend the development team for providing a more “authentic” style of gameplay compared to what Ultimate Team offers. Combine that with the fantastic suite of modes and excellent presentation as always, and we’ve got a great and memorable entry in the series this year.