We suppose you could say EA Sports FC 26 is a game of two halves.
For years now there’s been a push and pull between different types of virtual football players, some preferring a more true-to-life representation of the beautiful game, while others want a more fast-paced, arcade-leaning experience.
EA Sports’ solution? Authentic and Competitive presets which do genuinely change the game.
The publisher appears to have recognised that the audience for the former is your traditional offline player, who prefers to get into the weeds of their Manager mode by nurturing youth talent and scouting undiscovered South American wunderkinds.
Meanwhile, the latter is tuned for the sweats who live in Ultimate Team, cracking packs and swearing at the screen when they narrowly miss out on promotion in Rivals mode.
You can use the Competitive preset offline if you prefer, but you can’t take Authentic online. We suppose it’d perhaps make sense to add an option for the latter in online play eventually, but there’s no sign of that here at launch.
Before you start, we appreciate offline and online gameplay has always been tuned independently in this series, but Authentic and Competitive do genuinely feel dramatically different here – even to the most casual of observers.
The pace of the game is much faster in Competitive, and players are much nimbler and more capable of superhuman feats.
In Authentic, the ball moves much slower, and you need to work harder for scoring opportunities because the gameplay has been tuned around real-life data. Unless, say, Harry Kane is on the end of your crosses, those headers aren’t always going to go in anymore.
We like the Authentic preset because it brings an air of unpredictability to the experience. Sometimes in football you have to deal with sub-optimal conditions, like a sticky pitch or heavy wind. Those are all factors simulated here, which may force you to change your strategy.
If you’re the type of player who likes to tinker, then this year’s game will force you into that mindset more than any other. We opted for a random South Korean team in the K-League for our campaign, and we’ve been having a huge amount of fun trying to get the most out of a middling squad.
Outside of the new presets, the developer has also reprogrammed goalkeeper positioning, with a view to eradicating irritating errors and bounce backs. Obviously, it’s going to take months of gameplay to prove whether EA Sports has been successful in its ambition, but we haven’t found ourselves screaming at the screen just yet, which is a positive start.
The Career mode is largely familiar outside of these changes, although the addition of unexpected off the pitch drama gives you