FIFA Street 3

FIFA has made a mixture of good and bad games in the past as there seems to be almost a lack of any consistency from one title to the next. This kind of gaming ‘Russian roulette’ is although no doubt ensuring that there’s quite a few titles out there at any given time, means that us poor gamers are left feeling like guinea pigs at all times.

Fifa Street 3 is all about showing off more than the regular rules of the game. Undeniably,

Fifa Street

’s a well known and now well established franchise so it’s quite an interesting twist to specialise in football themed mini-games rather than the kick-about and perform tricks as you go style that made the Fifa Street 2 so popular.

This change is although offering quite a new area to the title and indeed does some things very well indeed, but for me it’s a little bit of a tangent from where we all would expect it to be. Beyond all the glossy EA graphics which you’d come to expect, the gameplay function is a grand attempt at offering up something new and interesting. It does this by providing you with three stages where you must chat with ‘Freestylers’ who’ll give you challenges to try and accomplish. These tasks include keepy-uppy and hitting the ball against the wall or hitting targets. All of the games (and there’s six in all) utilise a different game style and requires a specific number of core skills to win.

For example, Striker will let you play ten-pin bowling (you knock down trash cans rather than skittles). The layout of the ‘pins’ (or should that be bins?) changes from round to round ensuring you have to judge the shot to perfection to get the perfect score.

Freestyling, unlike the Striker game, requires you to press the right buttons in sequence as they appear (much like the dance style games). As you can tell this is far from being regular football as we know it, but more along the lines of street, dance-offs. In either case, it does provide some entertainment value and challenge you in ways other versions hadn’t.

The game’s ultimately let down mostly by its consistency – or rather, lack of. With inaccurate controls which made achieving certain targets as close to impossible as you can get, it largely relies on luck that you will indeed manage to accomplish some events.

Ultimately there’s quite a lot to this game and despite its faults it still makes a rather good game well worth a try. This game offers football to those who would tend to avoid games which involve running from end to end and scoring at one end. Although if you are wanting a proper knock-about, then there’s plenty of alternative titles suitable for your gaming needs.

Rating 78%

Positives

Lots of football based mini-games

Quite addictive

Negatives

Lousy controls make simple tasks nearly impossible

Inconsistency means that to get a gold medal and progress in one task will mean a Herculean effort on one game and barely anything to win in another task