The meat of the game is the aforementioned Rule the Street mode. Here you build up a squad which you then play off against other street teams, (all made up of international sporting superstars, naturally) in kick abouts. Playing these matches supposedly increases your player's skills and will accrue you SBs depending on how stylish your match was, which can then be spent on upgrading your team. Get your team's rating up high enough and you can enter that area's knockout tournament. Win this and another zone in another country unlocks so you can repeat the process all over again. As matches are won by the first team to score five goals the relative strength of the opposing goalies to your player's abilities means games can last upwards of twenty minutes. Consider that you will have to win eight matches before you get to enter the first and you can begin to appreciate just how long it would take to finish the campaign. The constrained pitch size and reliance on tricks leave little room for gameplay which is a pleasure and a challenge to master, so the desire to play through to final victory was utterly absent from my mind.

Irrationally, have decided to remove all Live functionality from the European releases of their games. Even though all the coding has been done and is present in the North American versions, for some inexplicable reason EA have seen fit to provide European gamers with a lot less product than their North American cousins. What you are left with is local where up to four gamers can face off in teams of two. There's also a friendly match option where you can just have a leisurely kick about with the team of your choice. There's also the option to create a dream team, but as you can only use this team against the computer or in multiplayer it's not much of an attraction.

Like all EA sports games the curse of The is all too evident. Apparently, a while back someone at EA made the decision that what gamers really wanted was the chance to play Barbies with their favourite sporting stars. Accompanying the now-standard player appearance options, which are typically comprehensive to the point of ridiculousness (this gimmick is wearing seriously thin), there are a host of clothing options to unlock. Yup, play for twenty hours and you are rewarded with a pair of bright orange surf shorts. Which only your virtual dollies, I mean footballers, can wear. For all its purported ghetto toughness this fevered attraction to girly dressing-up makes me wonder whether this game should be in the psychiatrists couch rather than the shelf. Additionally, the animation is often left wanting. Players sometimes move around the pitch in stiff jerky movements and the joins between many of the moves are often rough, with obvious jumps in both ball and player movement all the more obvious because of the close up nature of the action. The graphics are otherwise rather good, with the players looking particularly impressive even if their bodies resemble NBA players. The pitch backgrounds are varied yet there's no life to them as they are devoid of any incidental animations.

Being a Street title, the presentation is seeped in urban ghetto culture. Or what the marketing men reckon is urban ghetto culture. This means that there's a whole bunch of frantic licensed tracks and some over-zealous commentating. If the entire game was full of that shite called urban music, or even more laughably, R&B, that floats around the British charts like so much effluent, I would have been hurting inside. So it's a relief that the music is pleasingly varied, with music from most of the cultures in the game getting a look in. While they occasionally let some crap seep in, whoever is in charge of EA Tracks licensing division really has a good handle on their job.

As do the EA marketing people. This game has been heavily promoted on TV and print and will no doubt sell in large numbers. And even though the game is often very sloppy and a mess to control and despite the fact that the trick system makes Street less about than THPS, most of those consumers will probably be fairly content with their purchase. You see, even though I was astonished by the terrible controls, infuriated by gameplay and dismayed at the barrenness of game modes I did find myself playing this game more than was necessary to write this review. It did have a certain pull over me which I am somewhat ashamed to admit, considering the slapdash and cynical nature of the title. I doubt I will still be playing it in a week unless it's with a few friends over some beers, but for a while I did manage to take some enjoyment from the game. FIFA Street could well be a good game by the time it comes round to its third or fourth sequel, but for the moment it stands as a testament to the creative and technical desolation that characterises so much game these days.

63%

By Sam Gibson