A GAME OF TWO HALVES

EA SPORTS FC 26 is truly the beautiful game, but it makes plenty of tactical errors

- Jake Tucker

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 with the annual footy fest. 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 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 OK; 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