FUT Draft Mode costs FIFA Points to enter

FIFA 16 players won't do the things you want them to do in the instructions such as giving a winger the free roam ability, you only occasionally see them in the center but most of the time they will still be glued to the position they are set at, especially when the ball goes out of play. This makes world class players playing on the wing feel wasted. In terms of tactics and team mentalities such as ultra attacking or all out attack, they don't feel that different to balanced. You will notice fullbacks pushing forwards and players making a few more forward runs, but notice how I said a few.

All out attack for example you would expect the whole team rushing forward with movement from everywhere but that does not happen and most of the time what I have noticed is your defenders push up higher and sometimes join in the attack but the midfield and strikers are still stale in movement and then what happens is you get punished on the counter attack. Formations do work very well in Fifa and have done for many fifas which is something they have done well, but it does have a strange sort of trigger in career mode which I will get into later.

Other changes in FIFA 16 are rather more superficial. I'm sure the cameramen that patrol the sidelines are a new addition, or they're certainly more prominent than I recall. This year, you can run towards them after scoring to prompt a new celebration. And there's a bizarre new feature that sees Tyler pass over to a hopelessly wooden Alan McInally, who'll report goals coming in from other matches. It's unclear whether these goals are drawn from online games being played simultaneously, or are simply invented as part of the illusion that you're taking part in a kind of interactive Sky Sports broadcast, but either way they're an unnecessary distraction. And it's a pity no one saw fit to take out Alan Smith's immersion-shattering reminders of his ability to recognize exactly where the ball entered the net.

As someone who refuses to spend any money in FUT, I was delighted to at last get the chance to play with the best players and have some respite from vanilla FUT's annoyances (what I'd give for automatic contract renewals). Imagine my disappointment, then, when I found out that Draft Mode costs FIFA Points to enter - about ￡2.50's worth. With scant rewards on offer for winning games, it's little more than a cynical additional EA revenue stream that most will find pretty hard to swallow. Career Mode remains largely unchanged, barring a few tweaks to training and pre-season. One suspects that Draft Mode took up a fair part of this year's development time and that's before, of course, we consider the investment made in FIFA 16's headline-grabbing new feature - women's football.

It's a relatively limited mode, offering only friendly online matches or an offline tournament (needless to say, only against the same gender), but it's nevertheless a wonderful thing. Everyone seems to run at the same speed and everyone is equally capable of barging a defender out of the way, no matter who they are. Individual skill is simulated to a degree but a lot of the time it just feels like you're playing with a team of clones, no matter what they look like. Oddly the female teams suffer less from this problem, since they're programmed to be more prone to error and by consequence seem more realistic and believable.

Regardless, it's still a fun game with impressive animation and authenticity. The pros are obvious – remarkable player likeness, attention to every detail in the animations and environmental settings, and expansive features (for the men's side). Cons - for all the number of commands and skill moves it can be frustrating, even for the veteran gamer to master all the commands. Overall, it's as close as most of us will ever get to playing in the World Cup.