Fifa 20 review: Finally a fully new football experience, for better or worse

But mostly for better

Fifa got its flair back. For once, at last, Fifa 20 is a footballing game that feels really new, with a host of updates that don't simply tweak or smoothen but throw entirely fresh new ways of playing.

As in real football, that flair comes with its own risks: you might overreach, you might fail, you might look silly. Fifa 20 manages to do all of these things at points, and sometimes all at once.

But it is such a thrill to see them try, and when the risks come off, they are spectacularly exciting. It is so much more preferable to being iterative and safe that most of the strange changes are entirely forgivable.

The most spectacular of the new changes is of course the Volta mode — the return of the freestyle play that was made so famous by Fifa street. It sees the play head off the pitch and into parking lots, 5-a-side pitches and a variety of other makeshift locations that are impressively international in their scope.

It is Volta that you are likely to fire up first and jump into. It does an excellent job of encouraging you to do so: EA Sports has created a whole new, glaringly bright design for the Volta part of the game, which lures you in with blazing neon.

It also comes with its own story mode (which puts men and women on the pitch together for the first time in Fifa), serving as a way to push you to unlock new locations and outfits for your players.

There are problems with Volta, of course, as there might be with anything this new.

The gameplay feels like it could have been tweaked more to make way for the claustrophobic pitches and the tiny teams, with a bit more of a focus on control and tricks. The smaller pitches throws focus onto the lack of precision that Fifa can sometimes be accused of, and that hasn't been entirely fixed for the new game.

But perhaps most frustrating of all is the decision to have the Volta mode focused around knock-out tournaments that you absolutely must win to progress through the game. It means that a loss in the final — which could have taken you the best part of an hour to get to — means falling all the way back to the beginning of the chapter, and playing all the way through again, sometimes repeatedly.

Those issues are not enough to ruin the mode, but are just enough to fray your patience and remove some of the excitement. And they mean that you are unlikely to stay in the mode — even after only a few days playing Fifa 20, it has become more of a snack and less of a fully-fledged commitment.

Thankfully, there's plenty to be getting on with away from Volta. Back on the full-sized pitch, Fifa has tweaked both the look and feel of the play, making welcome aesthetic changes and interesting alterations to gameplay that mean normal games still feel fresh.

The first thing you are likely to notice is that pace is back — but only for the players that have it. The very fastest in the world will speed across the pitch, making quicker footballers valuable again, but slower ones will really struggle to catch up.

That applies within teams, meaning that fast strikers are once again able to outrun slower defenders, and goals can be put together a little more rewardingly. It also applies across teams, meaning that while matches at the very top of the game will be much speedier, those lower down can feel realistically sluggish.

That is added to by the fact that the pitch feels bigger, with more space between players to run into and to pass the ball across. That makes games of Fifa 20 feel more tactical as well as spacious, encouraging you to think a little more about the shape of your overall team.

Among other things, these changes make the game feel harder, and more punishing; if you miss a chance for a great pass, it'll close up, and defenders will punish you accordingly. It also means that it is vastly more rewarding: goals feel as if they have come from real work, needing to be slotted together rather than screaming miracles that appear to come from nowhere.

Out is the Journey, the story mode that has been a feature of the last three games, in favour of Volta. It's unlikely to be missed: what felt like a dream for many players quickly fell out of favour amid storylines that were too much on-rails and characters that failed to be interesting or engaging.

But Volta recreates some of the same mistakes that plagued the worst bits of the Journey: you're asked to take over a very bland hero, and sympathise with him; the villains are a little too cartoonishly villainous; everything is a little too generic and anonymous to be really meaningful.

EA Sports's difficulty in making a really engaging and deep story mode feels like a tragedy because there is just so much potential — so many possible stories to tell, and so many exciting ways to tell them. It would be nice to delve a little more into the reality of being a manager in the Career mode, or the various countries you travel around in Volta; instead, these are smoothed away in the aim of making a game that appeals to absolutely everyone in its anonymity, and both suffer for it.

Thankfully Volta doesn't ask you to care all that much, and you're not subject to the same long cutscenes. It becomes clear soon enough that the story is really just an excuse to hang together the different games, and the unusual, RPG-style teammate recruitment mechanism that ties them together.

Career Mode has had some updates, but they are mostly a similar kind of sheen that will be familiar to anyone from the Journey: you can now field questions from the press and your players in real time, choosing your responses by pointing your joystick, and while it is initially fun the feature seems destined to be skipped once you make your way deeper into the season.

Ultimately there are few things Fifa 20 had to do: bring some new excitement to the old game, and bring the sheen and reliability of the old game to the new. On those measures, it is a clear success.

But it is positive to see in a much more encouraging way, too. The new game suggests that EA Sports have realised that endless roster updates and new ways to encourage people to buy loot boxes does not make for an encouraging upgrade.

Instead, Fifa 20 is actually trying something new. It almost wouldn't matter whether it was for the better — but, thankfully, it mostly is.