FIFA Street 3 - First Look Preview

EA Canada's first two FIFA Street games on the previous-gen machines were definitely a lot of fun. Placing football stars (adorned in trendy looking tracksuits and jerseys) back on their childhood turf of inner-city playgrounds and rickety favelas, the game retained an air of street cred (despite Zane Low's 'hip' commentary) amongst its menagerie of cool tricks and stylish goals.

Now, the series hops onto the next-gen machines with radical changes. Firstly, the EA Canada team has bought the NBA Street Homecourt engine to the fray in order to up the next-gen ante. Yes, we're aware that FIFA has a dodgy track record with engines from EA's other sports games (e.g. the early FIFA games using the NHL engine), but it really seems to have worked this time. Even at this very early stage it still feels very much like football at its core, but with that more constrained 'Street' style of play that you might expect. Doing flips off walls, passing it to yourself against the sides while whistling past an opponent and volleying a screamer after the ball ricochets off the back wall, are all part of the fun. The development team has avoided the pitfalls that such an engine might create, such as passes that move along rigid paths and shots that make the ball loop like a basketball three pointer.

In fact, the shooting is one of the game's strong points. Headers and volleys are integrated seamlessly and to destructive effect, while a nifty little risk-reward system has been added into the game for more conventional shots. Basically, the longer you hold down the shoot button, the more your player moves into a slow-mo shooting animation while all the other players remain at normal speed. It's just one little touch that adds to the feverish pace of the game and ensures that there's never a dull moment during matches.

Speaking of the matches, there's an impressive array of match types to choose from. You've got Timed and 5-a-side matches (both of which work on a basis of high score wins after a timed period, but with 5-a-side games taking Game Breakers out of play). There's also games that centre on players reaching a certain amount of goals first (Score and Score Difference match types), as well as our personal favourite Headers and Volleys, which really is 'Street' stuff. Yes, we would like to have seen 'Jumpers for Goalposts' and 'Cuppie' match types, but I don't think the Yanks would've understood those, so they were probably non-starters in the development process.

The Game Breaker system is back with a vengeance, becoming activated via a press of a button once you've filled up a skill meter. The meter will fill up with the more skills you pull off in a chain, before finishing with a shot on goal (to stop people doing unchallenged keepy uppies in the corner to fill the meter). Once the meter is full you can instigate your Game Breaker, which dampens the background colours while adding bright trails to the ball and boosting your ability to score a goal for a limited period of time (i.e. making you harder to tackle and with more lethal shots). Again, it's a feature that adds to the hectic, fevered and fast-paced action in FIFA Street 3.

The other controls are similar to the main FIFA game, for the sake of similarity, but there are a few significant differences. Firstly, there's one button for flicking the ball up for volleys, or maintaining ball juggling with rhythmic taps of the same button. Additionally, the right analogue stick can be used for skill moves but, unlike the main FIFA, the skill moves are much more accessible for newcomers and they feel incredibly intuitive.

It's these sorts of qualities that make the game perfect for multiplayer duals, which is something that the developers have seized upon with their game modes. Head to Head will tally your results and organise best of [insert the desired amount of matches] games, as well as tracking player's stats against each other. Playground Picks allows you to pick from the 250+ players on offer - rather than being constrained to selecting one of 18 international teams - and create a dream team to battle your mates with. Even the game's main single player game, FIFA Street Challenge, supports co-operative gameplay. At a modest seven or eight hours in length, this mode mostly features progressively hard challenges allowing you to unlock new teams etc., and definitely confirms the game's focus on multiplayer gaming.

New for the series is the chance to play online if you don't have any friends (or if your mates are just annoyingly good) and EA Canada have definitely gone to town on this feature. Similarly to Interactive Leagues in the main FIFA game, players will be able to select an international side and try to move them up the worldwide league. The more wins an international team tallies up around the globe, the higher up it will be in the league. We're assured that there will also be ranked and unranked matches with all the usual trimmings.

The game's AI has been taken from the main FIFA game and then stripped down for backstreet style play (i.e. less players, smaller pitches and more stress on showmanship). This seems to be working functionally at this stage, but there's still a whole load of time to improve on the AI seeing as the game isn't due out until next spring. The player characteristics have also been influenced by the FIFA mother ship, but the FIFA Street team has simplified it down to a five star rating and specific player traits. There are Finishers (think Crouch), Tricksters (Ronaldhino), Playmakers (Beckham) and Enforcers such as Gattuso. It's a nice little touch that adds a bit of differentiation between the players.

Where the differentiation really comes into play, though, is with the new visuals. Rather than the lifelike looks of players in previous FIFA Street games, they've all been given caricatured appearances. That includes Crouch's beanpole legs, Landon Donovan's humongous spam-head and Rooney's tubby schoolboy looks. Couple this with some nicely designed arenas and the visuals compliment the fast paced, yet still easy going, style of the game.

Finally, the sound has also had a makeover. Replacing the commentary of Zane Low (thankfully) are a bunch of recorded lines of footballers calling for passes and warning of a man on etc. It might sound a little bit uninteresting, but it actually adds to the atmosphere of the game considerably. What EA Canada did is mic up a load of people with different nationalities playing football. The result is French players shouting at each other in French and English players sounding like Cockney wide-boys. It certainly adds character and replaces a previous commentary format that was a little too 'cool' for our liking.