EA SPORTS FC™ 24

I've sat through enough couch sessions with this series to know exactly what you're getting, and with EA SPORTS FC 24 the honest answer is: a meaningfully better game of virtual football wrapped around the same old structural problems. The on-pitch feel genuinely improved this time around. Player movement is smoother and more responsive than its predecessor, transitions between animations flow without the jarring cuts that used to plague dribbling sequences, and the new PlayStyles system is the most substantial mechanical addition in years. Spread across six categories including scoring, passing, ball control, defending, physical, and goalkeeper, PlayStyles assign passive abilities to individual players pulled from real-world data. Watching Luka Modric flash gold as he curls a through ball or seeing a winger's crossing PlayStyle turn a routine delivery into something devastating actually makes players feel different from one another in a way the old traits system never quite managed. HyperMotionV, built using volumetric data from over 180 professional matches, supports all of this by making weight and momentum feel more physical than before. For the couch crowd, the split-screen and local co-op support is all present and accounted for, and cross-platform multiplayer means your online sessions won't be limited to your own platform. Full controller support is solid and the gamepad layout is as intuitive as ever for a series with this much history. The revamped menus are cleaner and faster to navigate, which matters more than it sounds when you're trying to set up a quick friendly between four people who all have opinions about formations. Ultimate Team also introduced something genuinely interesting this cycle: male and female players on the same pitch. It expands the squad-building space considerably and reshuffles the online meta in ways that keep things fresher than usual, at least early on. Here is where the good news runs out for a significant portion of players. If Ultimate Team is not your primary mode, FC 24 is a hard sell. Career Mode received only cosmetic updates, including Player Agents that give you contract objectives during your Player Career and Tactical Visions for Manager Career, but the bones are underdeveloped and bugs were widely reported, from invisible players in menus to frame rate drops during matches. Teammate AI is noticeably inconsistent, particularly in defensive shape, and tackling physics produced some genuinely baffling results, with balls ricocheting off tacklers and straight into the path of attackers. The commentary overhaul with new voices also landed poorly, feeling stitched-together rather than natural. On the PC side specifically, optimization complaints and crash reports were common enough at launch to be worth flagging if you are on a mid-range rig. The bigger picture issue is that this is a game caught between two identities. The rebrand generated real expectations that EA would strike out in a new direction. Instead, the development effort clearly flowed toward Ultimate Team, which got Evolutions (a progression path to upgrade individual player cards), mixed-gender squads, and the bulk of post-launch content attention. Single-player and offline players got incremental changes. The microtransaction ecosystem inside FUT remains aggressive, with FC Points purchasable for real money feeding a card economy that favors heavier spenders. If you are a FIFA veteran who plays Weekend League and keeps up with the FUT meta, FC 24 is the tightest the on-pitch action has felt in some time and the Evolutions system adds genuine long-term engagement. If you are a casual fan who mostly wants to play as your club in Career Mode or run a quick Kick-Off game with friends, the couch multiplayer holds up just fine for a fun evening, but the single-player depth simply is not there to sustain you through a full year.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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