EA Sports FC 24 isn’t the huge departure we’d hoped for

videogameschronicle.com:

It’s boring, reductive, and incorrect to say that every yearly football game from EA is “just like the last one with a different name”.

However, if there were ever a year that this oft-quoted criticism was applicable, it’s arguably the debut entry in the EA Sports FC franchise.

EA Sports FC 24 (hereafter referred to as FC), the first release since the less-than-amicable divorce between football’s governing body and EA, smacks of a game trying to find its identity before it can deliver on the changes that EA claimed FIFA had always held it back from making.

The largest changes, perhaps unsurprisingly, are found in the game’s money-making behemoth, Ultimate Team. While the premise remains the same in FC as it did in FIFA, the headline change in this mode is that for the first time both male and female players are featured, and mixed-gender teams are allowed.

Ultimate Team has always been a mode that’s based purely on fantasy. Players who have just celebrated their 18th birthday playing centre-back alongside someone who’s been dead for their team-mate’s entire life isn’t strange, but the introduction of female players cuts a striking visual change.

It is strange to see a 5ft female winger shoulder barge a 6′ 2″ centre-back out of the way. However, considering Ultimate Team has always had problems with the likes of the diminutive Lorenzo Insigne absolutely bodying players in their path, it highlights more of an overall issue in the way body sizes and strength are seemingly a dice roll in the money-printing mode.

In reality, we think including players in the mode will do more for the women’s game than any Lionesses victory. By making some of the female players just as viable, if not more, than some of the men, young people playing