EA SPORTS FC™ 27

On one hand, it's fun because it's football. On the other, it's frustrating because it's EA. The Grounds game modes can be fun, but it's not nearly as good as it could be. 1v1s, 2v2s, and 3v3s feel a lot like street football, which is welcome. A lot of the other game modes are questionable. The open world itself isn't that interesting, yet that was the main concept behind The Grounds. It feels rushed and the purpose of it isn't clear. The different stores you can visit to buy apparel and equipment are basically all the same. The matchmaking and queue system being contained within a single Ground server is rather poor and most of the time, there will only be a few game modes you can actually play because they are the only ones players are queuing for. There's nothing worth playing in The Grounds right now that couldn't have been thrown onto a menu rather than building a town around it. It's as if they just copied the NBA 2K concept but didn't think much about the purpose or objectives. There are many technical issues like queuing into repeated disconnections. Also had these issues in Ultimate Team, and it's not just me -- a lot of players are complaining about the same thing. I've experienced many bugs with the UI, like getting elements stuck and they won't go away without a restart, or just straight up getting stuck on a screen and being unable to back out of it. This was happening in last year's game too, especially when you check the season pass progress screen. I'm confused why a UI bug like that is still affecting the game over a year later. Expect many visual bugs in The Grounds. I've seen many, like my player's jersey being tucked in when I've clearly selected it not to be, my player randomly changing skin tone in a match, but only on certain parts of his body, my authentic Spurs kit that somehow changes its badge logo to my in-game Club's logo. The online multiplayer modes can be fun, but don't expect them to be a simulation of the actual sport. Moreover, while they do reward skilled play, and the better player usually wins, they primarily reward meta play and abuse of overpowered mechanics and game systems. This is different than the standard expectation for a competitive game, which rewards strategy, game knowledge, mechanical mastery. For example, I've never been a top tier dribbler. I'm more passing focused. But give me a short woman with good dribbling stats and agility and I can consistently dribble the entire pitch into the opponent's box. I am not exaggerating. It's absurd. This also has the effect that you can't really play Ultimate Team the way you want while also playing at your competitive best. I want to win, but I also want to be able to play as a team that builds up gradually, baiting the opponent into a press, then suddenly changing from a slow build-up to a rapid break into a goal-scoring chance when I have an advantage. In reality, what Ultimate Team rewards is winning the the ball and getting it to your fastest player/best dribbler and carrying it with him the entire pitch. You can maybe make a pass or two depending on the scenario. You are basically gimping yourself if you don't play this way, and adapt to defending against it with high pace defenders. This has been a problem in Ultimate Team pretty much ever since it began. If you want something closer to real football, try a single player career mode experience with sliders tuned specifically to make the game as realistic as possible. You can find sliders made by the community for this purpose. I recommend it because I have fun playing it. People like me who enjoy football and sports gaming can definitely enjoy this game. But it's also a very frustrating game and nowhere near as good as it could be.