Starting up Fifa 10 I notice that ‘Virtual Pro’ is a new feature and I’m a curious type of person so I take a closer look. It boasts that we can now “grow a created player across multiple game modes” and I am intrigued. When I finish creating my player, an attacking midfielder so I can fully impact the forward areas and shirt number 7 as I sometimes have difficulty counting beyond that figure, I click to “download game face” which I assumed would be a simple task. You see I already created my face on the EA servers but apparently Fifa 10 is so damn special I need a new one so I go ahead and download the game face software to my laptop. I then had to download something known as ‘Unity Player’ so I can witness a spinning EA Sports symbol and continue with the process. The site informs me I have completed registration and can now sort out that game face I’ve been waiting for. It’s a shame that the next screen had the following message – “This site is currently unavailable. Please try again later.” – oh well, maybe next time.

Starting the Be A Pro season playing for Celtic I begin my first match and notice that I really like the default camera angle. The original Be A Pro mode had the camera tight behind your player and that seriously restricted your view of what was going on around you. My preferred option was to play with the Tele camera but the default angle here works surprisingly well and has a nice floating feel as it tracks your position.

The second thing I notice is that everything seems slightly more difficult than last year’s offering. I am involved in the build-up to a couple of attempts at goal and after about 25 minutes I start wondering why my team have yet to score against lowly Hamilton who have yet to have a single attempt on my goal. In a flash they ping the ball up to one of their strikers who leaps above my defenders and bullet headers the ball into the back of my net. I started to wonder what the hell was going on and looked around in case a hidden camera was recording this farce. Half-time and my team being 1-0 down had Andy Gray describe them as “a bunch of useless overpaid tossers” or that could have been me as we’re both Scottish and it’s hard to tell the difference. A few minutes into the second half and one of my team-mates were dragged down in the box. Penalty! I nervously stepped up and hammered the ball home to make the score 1-1. Things were looking up. On the hour mark I collected the ball around 30 yards from my opponent’s goal, made a clever one-touch pass and continued my run, called for a pass and picked it up on the edge of the box, and rifled the ball past the helpless goalkeeper. Very nice. I set up a third goal and the match ended 3-1.

As with every Fifa title you can take or leave the commentary but Andy Gray must have been drunk while recording part of his dialogue as he claims that Jock Stein led Celtic to 10 league wins in a row but the figure he was searching for is 9. As a Celtic fan I find that inexcusable but what makes it even worse is that you hear it during pretty much every single match involving the team. In future I may opt to switch the commentary off altogether because that statement really does annoy me.

The graphics in this edition are not improved from last year but that’s not a huge issue for me as I liked the visuals in Fifa 09. I still don’t understand why we must be haunted by the face of Wayne Rooney each time we play Fifa. Staring at a realistic looking virtual model of Rooney makes me dream of Fifa from years back when the graphics were fuzzy and you couldn’t make out facial features so well.

When the multiplayer side of Fifa 10 decides to let you connect with a friend it’s as much fun as ever. This really is one of those games which comes alive as soon as you add a few friends to the mix. There’s nothing quite like rifling the ball into the back of your friend’s net and rubbing it in by doing the silly robot celebration inside of his goal. If you’re reading this Jono – haha!

I can’t give this a higher score than Fifa 09, despite the fact that the gameplay has been tweaked ever so slightly, as the small additions are the usual baby steps we’ve come to expect from Fifa titles. I focussed on the Be A Pro mode as that is what, in my opinion, should have been improved the most and while it’s slightly more balanced things just haven’t moved as much as I had hoped.

8.5/10

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