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FIFA 06 Road to the FIFA World Cup
You’re looking at the only official World Cup 2006 game. What’s more it’s exclusive to Xbox 360, perhaps giving football fans reason to reach for a whole new console!
- Platform:
- Xbox 360
- Release Date:
- 2 December 2005
- Publisher:
- EA Sports
- Genre:
- Sports
Although Road to the FIFA World Cup is largely based on the recent FIFA 06, available for all other consoles and PC, it takes full advantage of the new Xbox 360. Obviously a more powerful console means sharper visuals, richer in detail, but a huge advantage that also affects gameplay is improved animation for the players. There is over three times the amount of animation in the Xbox 360 game compared to the current generation consoles and PC. This allows for greater realism in context-sensitive situations – for example a player’s first touch, or the sweetness of his strike. Slick animation, combined with a solid 60 frames-per-second refresh rate, also enables faster responsiveness. Overall, the Xbox 360 experience feels more natural to play than its lesser-powered counterparts.
More Xbox 360 tricks and flicks include interactive loading screens – you can pass the ball around with a mate while waiting for the game to start, even practice your shots on goal. Apparently this has something to do with Xbox 360 having three CPUs, which sounds impressive. Also related to loading times, there’s no need to enter a menu screen for substitutions. If you’re making a routine change, say on the 80th minute, you can map the change onto a button and press this while the ball is still in play. Soon as the ball goes out of play, subs for both teams are made automatically.
Apart from technical enhancements, FIFA 06: Road to the FIFA World Cup also features a 2006 World Cup Mode, set out to be an accurate representation of the qualifying stages and final tournament. Of course you also get everything you’ll find in existing console editions. Player likenesses are spot on, with around 350 ‘Star Faces’ created to look exactly like their real-life equivalents, in particular their facial expressions (the rest are generic, but still detailed). Tactics can now be changed during the game in real time, using the left/right channels more and so on, again for added realism.
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Regardless of how good it looks, FIFA on XBox 360 clearly has a more fluid feel than the other versions. It’s a terrific game of football that, after many years of experimentation, now has a winning formula that EA has been smart to build on. You’ll like how the game’s AI now takes into account Team Chemistry, meaning that even the top teams have off days. Support on Xbox Live is bare bones, but at least it saves complication.