Fifa 10 can be great depending on how you look at it. Gameplay is awsome however manager mode is a terrible buggy mess.
Well basicly how i see it is the gameplay is just awsome and i feel it is the best football i have ever played in my lifetime and defently the best in the fifa series. The online is great and inovative, but the over hyped promised "authentic" manager mode is just a buggy mess.
Gameplay - The gameplay is epic, if you've played fifa 09 then you already know how good that was, imagine this, a faster response time, 360 dribbling more faster and effective long balls, and much more threatning and thunderous shots to more cleverer defending then that is what fifa 10 is. The feel is realistic as ever, and is defently the best football game ever made in terms of gameplay. The 360 dribbling is the most praised from everyone and thats for a reason, you have so much freedom to run now with it and going back to 09's 8 direction movement, and you realise just how awsome fifa 10 is to have fifa 09 deemed as unplayable. its pretty hard to explain you just have to play it to know what i mean. Throw some cool weather effects that really change the game, like rain will make the ball bounce lower but faster and zip so lofted through walls will be really inefffective and snow will make the ball bounce higher and faster.
Graphics & Presentation - Well you know esactly what to expect from a fifa game, the graphics are amazing and the presentation is esactly what you expect from a fifa game altough i think the main menu and MM needs a overhaul. The Commentary is similar to 09 but has more sayings now which is nice. And the animations of the players is just great defently lifelike to what real players do. The player models and faces most players look generally like them and some look identical to real life, but you still get the occasional screwups from ea but i mean i woudnt be too botherd as there are over 30000 players which all are mostly correct.
The weather is amazing, it looks increadable, and you will see players wear different things to gloves to long sleves shirts, in rain the players shirts have a wet look to it, and the crowd use umbrellas in rain.
Manager mode - I have created a own section for this seing as EA hyped this mode so much and seing as all the proffessional metacritics havnt really talked too much about this, but does it live up to its hype?
the answer is..NO. Unfortunetly it just fails.
Well i dont know where to start, the list of all the bugs or the promised hyped features that never dealived. Well first the Form, the form is a great idea but was implemented poorly, its basicly a form system that is like live season, it has arrows and players attributes change over different of games, but the system is broken. I like the idea but what has been done here is wrong, your players will rarley go up, the strikers form often goes up but evreyone else are rare to go up, and all the subs and reserves are all on down arrows, if you dont play them one game their forms completly drops.
Then we have the hyped weather logic system, well let me tell you its broken, ea still havnt explained wether its a bug or they did it on purpose, but basicly, in england, at day its pretty much always overcasty or rainy, i had one sunny game in a season. You would think in the may-august period there would be more sunny games but i had none, i had a sunny game in decemeber. Then %80 of games are at night which just dosnt make sense. then we have snow, i always everyseason get snow about october-november time but it never snows in january time, it even snowed once in september! Who knows what ea where thinking with that.
Then we have the bugs, well i think if im correct theres over 70 bugs on here, i dont think i can list everything but if you really want to know head over to the fifa10 fourms and you will know. But to be fair ea patched 6 which were the main ones but there is still many many bugs remaining. like players stats will only be recorded in freindlys and league games, but not in any cup competions, why would it record freindlys and not cups games. Subsituting a player will mean that his match rating will not be recorded, if you sub a player off he wont have a match rating, meaning your form will drop because the game thinks the player didnt play. so you could score 4 goals with someone sub him off and he wont get a rating and his form will drop. sometimes weekday games will be played at day even when my stadium has a night option. I could go on and on about bugs but i would be here all day, but its just a total mess.
As a overall Manager mode just dosnt feel like a true authentic realistic experiance as ea claim to be player wages and values are all wrong apart from the top 50 players. Transfer rumours are not what i thought it would be, and it just feels so basic, it still feels like a step back, i still think that the ps2 fifa manager modes are better than the current gen of consoles manager mode. As it stands Manager mode is real dissapointment.
Online - The online is great, and is really inovative, and is something i thought that football games could never do and that is i never thought playing a football game online would be as fun as playing a shooter online and it is. There is a thing called Virtual pro which is a player you create and improves through accomplishments which is basicly fifas own achievment system that gives attributes to your player. which he can be used online clubs, and any offline mode. it is really addictive and using him online in clubs is so fun and if you can get some freinds and make a club its a lot of fun.
Overall - As i said before you can look at fifa 10 at two ways, if your a guy looking for a epic single player manager mode expericnce then wow you will be very disspointed but if your looking for a overall great football game, with a viarety of online and offline modes with a amazing football gameplay, then this is a suberb game. overall despite the horrific manager mode, the game is a great game, if only EA checked their bugs properly then i would have gave this great game a 9 but i will say 8.5 for this one.