FIFA 23 Review: End of an Era

FIFA 23 is the last game in the “FIFA” series. After this year, EA Sports will not be able to name the game with the “FIFA” tag, but that’s next year’s problem to worry about. FIFA 23 has been out for more than a week now, but is it actually a great enough game capable of representing the end of an era?

I’ve been playing FIFA since the installation of FIFA 12. While I’ve played good, great, and phenomenal FIFA games, I would only put FIFA 23 in the decent category. I’m a career mode player myself, just like a huge portion of the FIFA community, but despite this, it doesn’t seem like EA Sports put the time and effort into ensuring the mode keeps on improving. An example of this is how NBA 2k’s my league mode, the exact idea of career mode has way more features and replay value than career mode, despite it being one of the least popular modes in the entire game, in contrast to the popularity of career mode. I expected massive change with the mode with this being the last FIFA and all, but all that was added was a few cut scenes, player personalities, and some little changes, just to make it seem different from FIFA 22, the last game. There’s nothing that makes FIFA 23’s career mode more enjoyable than FIFA 22’s in any sense in my opinion.

The gameplay has certainly changed though. It’s gone from a more arcade style of gameplay to a realistic style, where good decisions will actually have to be made by the user. This suits the casual online ultimate-team player like me, who doesn’t splash his whole bank account into the mode, to start beating users that are clearly not better than me (not in a cocky way of course :). They won’t be able to just use the pure pace of their cards to beat someone, allowing room for an actual skill gap, which I believe is a major W on the part of EA.

While I do believe that the gameplay has improved, the game itself isn’t memorable enough. Whether it’s the label around it being “the last FIFA,” I don’t think it would’ve been a memorable game even without the label. For now, I rate the game a 6.5/10, but that’s always subject to change the more I play, and the memories I make in the process!