FIFA 16 provides countless hours of fun football

I really like career mode, I think it is the life and soul of FIFA for me. In fact in any football game. I love to have an immersive simulation of the real football world and be able to create my own story. Career mode has depth, thanks to the massive amount of teams and players FIFA has and the brilliant amount of stadiums in the game now. It has always had enough meat to keep me happy, but it was always just enough, never amazing or mind blowing. Career mode for me has never been amazing, but enjoyable still and I still dig into it for seasons upon seasons. However over the years I am growing tiresome of it, due to the fact of it being the same thing every year with no real depth being added to it.

Meanwhile, the on-pitch irritations pile up. It's almost impossible to whip in a cross unless you drill it along the ground; any airborne balls invariably float into the box, sucked towards the heads of defenders like a tractor beam (unless you're the defending team, of course). Automated player selection seems more capricious than ever: I stared in disbelief as my winger ran to nod in a rare successful cross, only to leave it as control inexplicably switched to my striker five yards further back. If the new drilled pass seems to be a smart addition to your attacking arsenal, it's a double-edged sword, since a regular pass will now trundle towards its intended target.

Only the new no-touch dribble, which can be modified into a larger feint, is a total success, allowing you to commit rash defenders to a challenge before accelerating away. When I was a child my parents would tease me about my "Nintendo face",- when down to my last life and facing a tough boss, my cheeks would go red from sheer concentration. Nowadays, particularly when playing football or fighting games, I find the most telling sign is how hard I grip the controller. FIFA 14 gave me sore thumbs. And after a week of playing FIFA 16, the callous is back. So the gameplay is different. And apart from crossing, perhaps, it'd be hard to point out any one way in which it's definitively improved.

But then the "feel" of the game is the hardest part - both to define and critique. What about the rest of it? It should be said that none of these failings are game-breakers. FIFA 16 still plays a solid game of football and some may even prefer it to FIFA 15. But in our view both are amongst the weakest offerings from the series in the modern era. And yet from a sales point of view there are two main reasons why that doesn't matter, the first being that FIFA is a world famous brand with all the proper licences - and PES is not. The second is FIFA Ultimate Team, which as the modern day equivalent of collecting Pannini stickers would probably sell the game no matter what it actually played like.

Strides are being made within Fifa Ultimate Team, after a 12 month period in which EA was lambasted for meddling with its card-collecting, dream-team-building mode. Web and companion apps return although they require a (thankfully simple) verification process before use, and price ranges are much wider than those so heavily criticized last year. And what of the old debate pitting Fifa against old rival PES? As demonstrated by unending schoolyard squabbles on social media, it's an almost redundant debate - both games are edging back towards peak form, yet neither is likely to coax ardent fans of one series into switching sides.

Without a doubt, FIFA 16 provides countless hours of fun football. Any soccer fan will find tons to enjoy here. After all, this game is your mom's mac and cheese. It's familiar. It's comfortable. If EA's golden-booted goose keeps following this back-of-the-box approach, where it only cares about adding more bullet points to its tried-and-true core, PES might take back the throne as king of virtual football. Like a war-weathered Snake on an operating table, Konami ripped PES apart and rebuilt it in the Fox Engine. It still has some demons, but it's fighting them head-on. What matters is that the developers took risks to make their game better.