Good, but not great.
User Rating: 7.5 | FIFA Soccer 08 X360
Fifa 08 suffers from two major problems: passing and tackling. The tackling in this game is borderline impossible at times. The man-marking itself is pretty bad sometimes, too. But the worst part is that, though I struggled to just make a single tackle, the opposing team is able to tackle with ridiculous ease. Their man-marking is perfect, and my players almost never got into space. Part of the problem is that my team's a.i. is not very good when it comes to attacking. The runs they make are poor, and sometimes they will even run straight into me when I possess the ball. Passing is very bad, do to the previously stated facts that my opponents are defensive geniouses and my players can not get into any space. Even with passing assists at full, my player will still send the ball directly to the opposing defender. When your opponents do not even need to move to intercept a pass, something is wrong. Shooting is good, but I wished that you could have scored easier when shooting from long range. I really think that headers could have been better. I rarely ever win an aerial challenge, and when I do, the ball always goes off target. A lot of times my players would not even jump up to challenge for the ball. I think keepers could have been easier to score against. They will continously save shot after shot, and with it being so hard to beat the opposing defenders and get the space for a shot, I thought that they could be more forgiving. Referees are somewhat biased, as they will call fouls against you when you have barely even touched the other player. However, they do not do this too often, but enough so that you will notice it. In Fifa 07, when your player possessed the ball, the marker over him would light up. This in gone from this year's version, and it really angered me. Something like that would have been incredibly valuable in the crowded areas of the pitch. The scheduling in manager mode is a joke. The game will constantly schedule matches IN THE SAME DAY. Not only that, but in the ECC and EFA, the game will put two of the same teams in the tournament. So there might be two AC Milans, two Barcelonas, or two Liverpools. They also have this player rating system where they rank the players in your league based on performance. Here is the problem: if a player plays only one game all season and gets a high rating, then that player will be considered the best player of the season, even though he only played once. Goalkeeper ratings are just strange, because my keeper will have thirty cleansheets, concede only fifteen goals in the league, save eighty percent of the shots fired at him, and be rated the worst keeper in the league. The same goes for defenders. My defenders, for some reason, never recieved higher than a seven rating all season long.
There is a lot of good things, though. Player move remarkably realisticly. The difficulty has increased from last season, which is nice since Fifa 07 was very easy. You can also access tons of stats and articles when your connected to Xbox Live. I did not spend a lot of time on Be a Pro mode, but I found it pretty enjoyable. Fifa 08 is a good game, but falls short in the gameplay department. 
