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CNET editors' rating:
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Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 05/05/2006
- Released on: 04/24/2006
- Originally published on GameSpot: FIFA World Cup: Germany 2006 (Xbox 360) Review
A little over five weeks from now, the 2006 FIFA World Cup will kick off in Munich when the tournament's German hosts take on Costa Rica. Recent player injuries are already providing plenty of pre-tournament drama, but if you really want to get your experience under way a month ahead of time, you can claim the FIFA World Cup Trophy for your country in EA Sports' 2006 FIFA World Cup. EA Canada's latest football offering does a good job of re-creating the carnival atmosphere that surrounds every World Cup competition, and although the Xbox 360 game still lacks some of the best features from its PlayStation 2 and Xbox counterparts, it's a much easier game to recommend than last year's FIFA 06: Road to FIFA World Cup.
Gameplay options in 2006 FIFA World Cup include quick matches, online play, practice sessions, and penalty shoot-outs. In addition to those football game staples, you also get global challenge scenarios and, of course, a chance to guide your favorite international team through the World Cup competition. The World Cup mode will almost certainly be your first port of call, and although its default settings see you assuming control of one of the 32 teams that qualified for the finals, it's possible to play as any of around 125 different teams from all over the world. Furthermore, you have the option to take your chosen team through the relevant territory's qualification process or to jump straight to the last 32 teams using real or randomly generated group information.
The presentation throughout the World Cup mode, and throughout the entire game, is great. Before each match you'll see a camera, which is positioned somewhere in orbit around the Earth, zoom in on the appropriate German stadium, and then you'll be treated to flybys of the grounds where it looks like almost every supporter in the crowd came through the turnstiles armed with streamers, confetti, and balloons. You'll also get to listen to one of the game's many licensed songs, which come from an eclectic soundtrack spanning some 14 countries. Good pre-match commentary replete with World Cup trivia and anecdotes is the icing on the cake, and as your players line up on the pitch before kickoff, you feel both excited and nervous at the same time--exactly as you'd expect to before a real match.
Perhaps the easiest way to give you some idea of how much FIFA football on the Xbox 360 has improved since last year's game would be to state that 2006 FIFA World Cup plays more like FIFA 06 than the disappointment that was FIFA 06: Road to FIFA World Cup. 2006 FIFA World Cup for the Xbox 360 still doesn't feel quite as tight as the PS2 and Xbox games of the same name, but it's not far off, and it doesn't suffer from any of the awful slowdown issues that those two do. The Xbox 360 game plays the same fast-paced style of football that you'll find in other versions, but its ball physics are slightly less convincing, its players are less proactive off-the-ball (though you always have the option to send them on forward runs manually), and the match commentary, while very good for the most part, is more repetitive and less accurate.
It's not difficult to score often spectacular goals in FIFA, largely because the game's keepers aren't too clever, but they can still be very satisfying. And if you're playing on the correct difficulty level or against a suitable opponent, you'll inevitably still have goalless draws from time to time. The player animations are uniformly excellent, and although every player on the pitch has a handful of skill moves at his disposal, you'll find that good use of the excellent first-touch controls along with passes, through balls, and dummies are generally the best way to beat opponents. The controls on the Xbox 360 are largely unchanged since last year's game, and you still have the option to switch between a traditional FIFA control setup and one that will be more familiar to fans of Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer/Winning Eleven games.
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