2010 Fifa World Cup South Africa Review

Posted on 07. Jun, 2010 by Johnn0 in Games, News, Reviews

Major football event this year? Need an official game? EA Sports is here to help. The official game of South Africa 2010 is here but does it live up the the quality of FIFA 10 or is it simply trying to cash in on one of the biggest sporting events in the world?

Great atmosphere and visuals, separating itself from other footy games

Great atmosphere and visuals, separates this game from others

FIFA World Cup South Africa (FWCSA) utilizes the same engine that powered FIFA 10 and this means that the great gameplay makes its return in this installment with a few added extras.

Lets start with presentation, FWCSA has some very nice new touches that actually make it better than FIFA 10. Character models have an added level of detail during gameplay and when viewed up close, scores from other games that might affect your teams chances of progressing through the stages of the tournament are shown in intervals on your screen, streamers fly out from the crowd during the start of the game, crowds react well to events taking place, the commentary is good and hell there are even vuvuzelas bellowing out of the stadiums. EA has done a good job of separating the presentation of FWCSA and FIFA 10. The level of detail in this game is FANtastic (see what I did there??) all 199 national teams are available to you and EA deserves a special pat on the back for their efforts here.

Learn to love these guys, you are going to see them a lot.

There is one part of the presentation that gets a little annoying though and that is the camera switching to fans and coach’s between set pieces, it is a nice touch don’t get me wrong its just that it happens way too often.

From a gameplay perspective there is not much in that game that we haven’t seen before in prior FIFA games save for the new penalty kick mechanism that tries to replicate the pressure of taking a spot kick in a tournament of this level. It may not be the most complicated system ever but it can be easy to screw up and because of this it does add a little something to the experience.

The new penalty system is a welcome addition

The modes available to you in the game as you would imagine are all about the World Cup with modes like “Be a Pro” being retooled as “Captain your Country” which we first saw in UEFA Euro 2008. The premise is simple, pick your team, create your player and go be the best that you can be, with the ultimate goal of you player achieving milestones to one day become the captain of your selected country. Two new tweaks have been added here, a new default camera has been set and the ability to import your “Pro” from Fifa 10. As for the rest of the single player (or offline modes) rather they are pretty much what you would expect, you can play an exhibition match, play the world cup and do training, nothing groundbreaking.

Select you country, play with another, this is battle of the nations...

Select your country, play with another, this is battle of the nations...

Online in FWCSA has a slight twist to the normal modes in FIFA 10 with Battle of the Nations giving you the ability to chose a country you want to earn points for online, the nice part is that you are not locked into playing with that team, you can use any team you like, which if you are from Guatemala is a pretty nice feature. Other modes include the standard quick play and for the first time ever you can take part in the world cup tournament online. Worth mentioning here is the netcode that the game uses, 9/10 games against internationals are playable and while not perfect EA as always has done a good job and deserves a noddy badge for their efforts.

One other feature to look out for, which I was not able to test prior to writing the review is EA’s proposed “Story of the Finals” which promises to deliver fresh challenge scenario’s to you based on actual happenings in the tournament, which quite honestly sounds fantastic.

It's smaller in real life...

Conclusion

2010 Fifa World Cup South Africa is by no means the definitive football game for your PS3, just purely based on sheer details and numbers FiFa 10 blows it out of the water. What the game does do is take an impressive football engine add a whole lot of world cup flavour with direction and polish and it delivers a fantastic football experience that everyone who loves football should at the very least try.

As a final comment, if you are a South African PS3 owning football fan there should be no reason why this game is not on your shopping/begging list, when are you going to be able to buy a game that is based in SA and captures all our stadia again?

Waka Waka eh eh, Tsamina mina zangalewa, This time for Africa…