The most popular sport in the world is back to video game consoles as FIFA 22 looks to bring the magic of the pitch into the hearts of gamers. It's something that entire communities talk about and, when it's working flawlessly, it makes the player feel like the athlete or coach they always dreamed of being.
Unfortunately, when it isn't working flawlessly, it can remind gamers that they dropped money on a game that feels incomplete or glitchy. Instead of feeling like a dream, it can become a nightmare that forces their consumers to look for alternative football/soccer games. If FIFA 22 wants to be the best of the best, these are some changes they'll have to make.
10 Update The Gameplay
They say "If it's not broken, don't fix it" but I don't think whoever made that statement was much of a FIFA 22 player. What is the point of buying a new game every year when the controls, moves, animations, and general dynamic of the game remains identical?
Even Madden and NBA 2K will throw in something like a faster turn radius or a change in ball control. The player base isn't asking for colossal changes to the point where the game isn't recognizable. But there does need to be some kind of modernization.
9 Rework The Shooting Controls
Holding the right button and pressing a direction might be an easy way to shoot, but it's certainly not fun or accurate. What happens if players want to shoot a hard and low shot or lob a soft one over the keeper's head? Sorry, no dice.
There are criminally underused buttons on the controller ripe for changing up the shooting. Considering this is the most exciting part of the game, the actual gameplay should be equally exciting. The various nationality buffs don't feel that interesting when every club shoots the same way.
8 Ease Up On Dribble Moves
It is not an exaggeration to say that players who dribble the ball need to execute combos that would make veteran Mortal Kombat players faint. As if the complexity were not enough, the dribbling itself is not at all intuitive.
These moves all add a very important element to the game. In online play, when somebody knows all of these sequences and uses them properly, it's a thing of beauty. But when only a handful of people can actually execute them, the majority of players stick to choosing a team in career mode and ignore online play entirely.
7 Add Some Announcer Variety
This is not a fault against the announcers, who have clearly read every single line with inflection and energy. For the first five minutes of a game, the broadcast booth keeps the game fresh and alive with crisp narration. And then those five minutes end.
After that, the same lines start to repeat themselves over and over. For a game that is supposed to consume an entire year's worth of time, a few minutes' worth of announcements is simply not enough. The sport is too exciting to be bored to death by repetition.
6 More Dynamic Celebrations
I'm guessing that a player who scores a goal to cut a lead down to 10-1 isn't exactly going to be doing backflips across the field. And somebody who ties the game in overage isn't going to beclown himself by acting like the second coming. Sadly, these video game characters don't seem aware of the scoreboard.
There are lots of signature celebrations to mix in with the normal ones, but they are all over-the-top and don't seem to understand the scoreboard or the situation. Something is wrong when a player down by double-digits grabs the camera and starts smack-talking after a late and meaningless goal.
5 Balance Out Speed
Nobody is saying that speed isn't a good thing or that it isn't important to the game. But when some of the best players in the game get consistently beat by players who are just slightly faster, it's time to revise exactly how game-breaking speed should be.
Currently, a team full of maxed-out speedsters can pretty much whoop up any other organization regardless of their overall rating. It's OK for speed to be an advantage. Just give that advantage to other attributes as well.
4 Legitimize The Career Mode
Cringy cutscenes and goofy voice acting seem to dominate the landscape of career mode in other sports games. FIFA 22 doesn't need to try to be awkward in its career mode, but it does need to try and be something. Right now, it's... just nothing.
There aren't any big player decisions to make or relationships to build. There isn't the feeling of chasing a cup among the veterans on the team or climbing the depth charts for the rookies. The automatically-generated league bulletins don't even seem informed of the player's accomplishments. There needs to be something.
3 Less Greed In Ultimate Team
"If people don't like pay to play, they should play one of the other modes." The problem is that there is nearly no effort on those modes. The work is all invested in Ultimate Team. And the concept of Ultimate Team is fun! Putting together a fantasy team and working hard for rewards is rewarding.
But it becomes no fun when the player's fantasy team is simply outbought by an opponent. Not everybody wants to put up a second mortgage to be competitive. The money-barrier is not fun, no matter how profitable it is for the corporation that created it.​​​​​​​
2 Make Aggressive Tackling Viable
Aggressive tackling is just a good way to get a red card right now. Online players are waiting for an excited opponent to try and go for a quick steal, so they have their pass or dribble move ready. While that strategy is respectable, it's made defense very boring.
The passive tackling abilities are alright, but they take away from the excitement of trying to get a nice steal or block. After the fifth-or-so red card, players just give up aggressive tackling entirely, abandoning a dimension of the game that deserves to be realized.
1 Give Gamers A Better Franchise Mode
With such a lackluster career mode, the natural suspicion should be that all of the resources are put into a club mode. These suspicions appear to be warranted when there is an option to create a club. Sounds exciting, right?
Sadly, that excitement fades immediately after designing the team's colors and logos. The games trudge along, no decisions feel as weighty as reality, and there just isn't much available to invest in. There is no way to confirm that the poor single-player modes are trying to drive traffic into modes where players need to spend money, but what else are gamers supposed to think?
FIFA 22 was released on October 1, 2021, and is available on Xbox Series X and Series S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.