By Jake Tuckerpc Gaming

Copyright pcgamer

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is true of many long-running franchises, but nowhere is it more obvious than in EA FC. EA Sports FC 26, though, feels like a game finally willing to back up its yearly price tag. It doesn’t rip everything up, but a series of smart changes and a few long-overdue tweaks make this the most confident, rewarding entry the series has had in years.

It’s been a complicated couple of years for the sports game formally known as FIFA. EA Sports has been making football games since 1993’s FIFA International Soccer, but FIFA and EA had a falling out in 2023 which led to EA striking out on its own with EA Sports FC 24. It was a strong entry, but felt incremental. EA Sports FC 24 felt like a FIFA game, rather than a significant step forwards.

Fast forward a couple of years and EA Sports FC still feels like a FIFA game. If that irks you, you can stop reading now, it’s okay; FC 26 is a football game for better or worse and there’s a good chance you’ll already know whether you want to buy it. If you hate football, nothing here is going to convince you. Yet, FC 26 knows what players want and delivers it with style. The pacing is sharper, new and subtly improved animations give matches a real sense of weight, and the subtle tweaks across Career and Ultimate Team mean there’s a lot here to pull eager fans back in. FC 26’s improvements still feel incremental, though, and the loss of the 3v3 Volta mode stings, but it’s competently made—not quite a reinvention of the wheel, it’s just polishing the hubcaps.

The most noticeable shift for the game is that there are two different types of football now. Competitive, which is the standard FIFA/EA FC style full of right-stick trick flicking and sweaty goals, and Authentic mode, which is slower and a bit more thoughtful.

Switching the dial to Authentic reshapes the game with a few new features that are specifically called out: more life-like defending from AI teammates, re-tuned pacing of skill moves, authentic player reactions to in-game situations, increased influence of physics on ball movement, and realistic impact of fatigue on performance. In play, the key thing to take away is that when you’re kicking about in Authentic mode the game slows right down and you have to think a bit smarter to get the win. There’s less sprinting, a bit more of a focus on positioning and occasionally players will just make an error, looking a bit wobbly.

Competitive Environment

I’m pretty average at EA Sports FC and I was pretty average at FIFA before that, but in Competitive mode scoring against the AI is as easy as running it toward the goal, flicking the right stick to roll the ball gently to the side and then tapping it past the keeper.

In Authentic, it can often be a more realistic scoreline, scoring a goal or two, and I actually thought the six minute matches that have long been the default for EA’s football games were a little too short, with three minutes for each half barely leaving me with enough time for a proper attack. As a result, most matches would end in mere 1-0 and 2-0 scores instead of the 10-0 drubbings I was handing out in the game’s competitive mode.

The matches I’ve played with Authentic are pulse pounding—it feels like a truly revolutionary step from a series that, if I’m honest, hasn’t done too much in the way of innovation over the last few years. This is closer pace-wise to the old Pro Evolution Soccer games, and it makes an attacking build-up so rewarding it feels like the best way to play against the AI.

The catch is that Authentic can only be played in the single player matches like Kick Off and the career modes. Ultimate Team and the other online offerings can only be played with the Competitive preset. This sucks for Ultimate Team’s club battles, because you can only play it in Competitive. I like the slower. sim-y pace of Authentic, and it’s a shame that after offering it up to players EA are hiding it away.

Regardless, these two different presets exist side by side and it seems like EA has finally come up with a way to relentlessly poke and prod the competitive side of the game for the hardcore players while preserving a more chill experience for those that just want to play the career modes. We’ll see how it goes. In the time since I started reviewing the game a patch has dropped changing the way defenders react and tweaking how players move with the ball.

These patches will continue throughout the year, so the EA FC 26 that you can play online in six months is going to be entirely different to the one you can play now. If the plan is for Authentic to feel like the same experience throughout these changes, it’s easy to see how it could capture the imagination of fans that are left cold by the festival of Ultimate Team.

Competitive mode is similar enough to previous games that it doesn’t feel worth examining to the same degree. However, I do want to call out that the AI of both your team and their opponents is significantly smarter. When defending, the squad holds its tactical shape a lot better; when pushing forwards, there was always an attacker ready for my pass as I moved up; and goalkeepers collect balls efficiently. In both styles of play, movement feels fluid and responsive with the ball stuck to your feet until you clatter into a defender. In Competitive you can really take advantage of this, clamping down on the trigger to sprint and bypassing the enemy team with ease. Oh, and you can score from headers reliably again without having literal giants on your team. That’s nearly worth the price of admission alone.

Micro management

Sadly, while the football really is tremendous, FC 26 doesn’t quite stick the landing when it comes to the Manager mode. There’s a lot of new content here: the live manager hub asks you to achieve some pretty lofty historical challenges to win new kits and the classic mode feels fully fleshed out, but it’s very lightweight and, sorry but it’s true, quite annoying to play when you’re off the pitch.

Fortunately, there’s some pleasing randomness here: a training injury ruled out both my goalkeeper Areola and defender Kyle Walker-Peters before a key game, leaving me to rely on my terrible back-up keeper. The only way to avoid getting battered was to ensure the ball never made it near the net and so we parked the bus to leave my amateur goaltender unbothered and in his lane. After the match he sent me an email thanking me for giving him a chance in a key cup match. I guess he hadn’t noticed Areola laying face down on the field earlier that day.

But, the user interface is seriously lacking. Reading that email in the game’s Manager career mode was infuriating, as you try to navigate an in-game email client with sticks and triggers instead of the mouse and keyboard sitting right in front of you. Try to play the game on your keyboard, which I’d advise heavily against, and you get to the home screen of the career not by clicking on the giant home icon but by pressing the W key.

Negotiating to buy players is also exasperating as there’s just so much guesswork. Offer to buy someone and you’re asked to make a random bid. If you’ve scouted them before, you’ll know the player’s worth, but try to go a little lower and the other manager will go off in a huff and you won’t be able to hire him at all. Buy a player and you’re scored on it, ranked from between an A to an F on how well you managed to guess at whatever algorithm the game is using to decide whether I can put Scott McTominay in a West Ham shirt this season or not.

I can forgive FC 26 a lot of these errors just because of how good it looks. From the pre-match introductions all the way to on-pitch overlays, playing FC 26 feels like you’re watching a cohesive TV broadcast. Getting stuck into a season full of West Ham matches means I got to see the digitised London Stadium a whole bunch, and it feels just like the real deal.

Animations look good, celebrations look good. But there are some weird face captures: I chose to play as Graham Potter and FC 26’s weird little homunculus version of the man will haunt my dreams forever—but it doesn’t need to look like real life, it just captures the vibe. There’s not a lot that EA FC can do as a series to meaningfully improve its graphics right now, but it looks the part and is a joy on a 4K monitor where you can notice all of the little details.

Ultimate power

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the game seems designed to funnel you towards Ultimate Team. If you’re unfamiliar with Ultimate Team, it’s basically the football-themed Pachinko machine that is the equivalent of the Panini sticker books of my youth—except they release new stickers every single week and you can never fill the book.

Ultimate Team is gambling, it’s always been gambling, but despite the fact gamers have now agreed that we don’t like loot boxes, it’s always gotten a pass. It’s better here than it used to be: I’ve gotten a few kick-ass players without spending a penny, but the spectre of pay to win—the idea that you could have a better team and potentially win more matches if you were only willing to cough up a little cash—is ever present and refuses to be exorcised. It’s less grindy this year, you’ll get rewards faster, but the flip side is that in an attempt to flatten the powercurve those rewards are actually a little worse, meaning if you want to have the best time possible in the shortest timeframe, it’s still worth dropping some cash.

Play Ultimate Team and you should expect weird and wonderful kits and a pace of play more similar to basketball (with the same scorelines) as stamina just doesn’t seem to have any impact whatsoever. It’s fast and frantic and honestly pretty good fun, but it’s nonsensical, with the end of each match being a welcome breather as you can take a second to recover from the relentless pressure.

There’s plenty of game here, too much to fit into one review, but I tend to grimace whenever I have to do anything except play football because everything takes too long and makes you faff too much. But outside of its wonky menu UI, FC 26 feels like the strongest evolutionary step EA has taken with its big franchise in years. It’s still football, but it’s the beautiful game at its best. Top notch graphics, thoughtful improvements and the bold step of splitting the entire game in two to try and appease two different fanbases has made FC 26 feel like a real contender.