Review: Fifa Street

Fifa Street is the fourth street soccer simulator from EA Sports. The game shows off the finesse and showmanship of the "beautiful game" by focusing on individual skill moves, like dribbling and juggling the ball, which makes for a fun, challenging experience.

Typical soccer simulators focus on positional play and slick passing to dominate the opposition. In Fifa Street, the focus is on one-on-one situations, where the player uses skill moves to move past opponents. These flair moves are controlled with different flicks of the analogue sticks, bumpers and triggers, allowing players to easily perform complex moves. In addition, normal Fifa controls for passing and shooting remain largely the same - except for tackling, which now only has one button, with slide tackles no longer allowed.

The meat of the game comes in the World Tour mode, where players create their own teams, start off playing in their local neighbourhoods, and work their way up to the international touring scene. Performing more tricks while winning matches allows players to unlock skills and special moves and they gain points to improve attributes of individual players on their teams.

When players feel they have enough experience, they can take their teams online through ranked divisions and tournaments. Also, the online gameplay is closely linked to the single player. When players get to regional or national competitions in the World Tour mode, they can choose to play an online team. The ability of players to develop their World Tour single-player team and move them seamlessly online is definitely one of the highlights of the game.

There are a number of individual alternate game types. In Panna, players get points for performing tricks and bank them when they score a goal (a 'panna' is when players kick the ball through an opponent's legs, an 'eshibobo').

Other game types include Futsal, where the court has no walls, and Last Man Standing, where a player is eliminated every time a goal is scored. These game types add variety to the traditional 4 vs 4 'score-as-much-as-you-can' modes. Even though I enjoyed the variety of game types, I found them relatively repetitive and got bored of them quite quickly.

Another flaw in the game is the difficulty levels. While the bronze was far too easy for someone who has played Fifa before, the silver difficulty level is great for learning the mechanics of the game. However, the gold difficulty level was too hard and I found it frustrating. The opponent almost never missed and gold mode wasn't a natural step up from silver mode.

Taking the Uefa, Management, World Cup and Street games into account, this is the 47th Fifa-licensed game from EA Sports and the class of the series shows in this title. Even though the lack of game types and simplicity of the gameplay means it will never be as good as a technical soccer simulator, the graphics are stunning, and the gameplay is fun, addictive and incredibly easy to learn. The game is a welcome alternative to the traditional Fifa games and can be enjoyed by veterans and those new to the series.