EAFC 26 Review

Developed by EA CANADA and published by Electronic Arts, EAFC 26 is the latest football game out of the EA factory. The fanfare felt a little more stifled on this year’s release. Even with the powerful image of Zlatan Ibrahimovic giving it a marketing push, I think many, including myself, had concerns about the lack of competition again in the football atmosphere. But I can’t lie—I am an Ultimate Team addict, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands dirty and experience the most popular mode on the latest title.

So, what’s new, you ask? Well, to the eye, very little. Graphically, the game doesn’t look like it has progressed much further from the previous iteration. But to be fair, the likeness of most of the famous footballers was already very close, so it’s hard to improve on. So, gameplay is where most changes need to happen, and it would appear they have happened. EA have introduced an authentic gameplay mode to slow the game down and provide a much more tactical affair to simulate a real game experience. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but for purists who enjoy the play and manager career modes, it’s a feature that gels nicely to provide a slice of realism. But the standard competitive mode is still there, and this year it feels faster and heavier on the attack.

Clubs, which is the mode where you play as a single player as part of the team, hasn’t seen many new features other than the archetype progression. This allows you to train your player’s playstyle to match legends of the past to help your player develop. The manager and player career modes have new features like live challenges to give you more objectives and targets to aim for to help break up the monotony. You can unlock real-life football legends to use in the career mode to add a bit of nostalgia to the experience or allow newcomers to experience the magic of these legends.

The Ultimate Team mode, which is the crown jewel of this series, is what has received the most attention this year. For those that are unfamiliar, the Ultimate Team mode is where you put together a squad made from players you have opened from packs. The more you play, the more coins you can earn to open more packs or even complete objectives to gain specific packs. Failing that, you can spend real money to buy points to just buy packs, which is why this mode is so popular for both the makers and the gamers. For gamers, having the best players in your team is the first half of the bragging rights. The second half is being good at the game, and for those like me who don’t spend money on packs, getting good at the game is a must if you are to stand a chance against others with a heavily stacked team.

As the Ultimate Team mode carries the biggest value for EA, it’s obvious to see why this has received the most updates. There are new objective categories to try and complete which encourage you to play with teams and players you wouldn’t normally use. They have created a new feature called live events which exist for a small period where you have a limited number of chances to win and complete the event to get the most rewards. These ideas are great as they try to level the playing field by making the event silver players only, so both players must play with a weaker team. There are gauntlet challenges where you must play 3 rounds, for example, and all the players you used in the first game are not available to be used in the other 2 games, and so on. So, you need to have 3 competent enough teams to try and compete. They also invest heavily in the updates to keep the game fresh on a weekly basis, and they tend to listen to feedback about how the game flows and adjust to help create a balanced, fair game.

So, if you are asking how the game feels and plays, my initial reaction is much the same as last year’s game with some tweaks. This always happens with the new game in the series, and it’s always more negative than positive. The main gripes from last year were that goalies were not good enough and there was too much gameplay mechanic abuse. It’s true to an extent that goalies do seem to move a bit better and that 1-on-1s are not as guaranteed goals as once before. But sadly, although they took away the main areas where people abused the gameplay mechanic so they could score a goal every time with a particular action, it didn’t take long before people found new ways to abuse the mechanics, which is a shame and in my opinion isn’t really needed.

The gameplay, specifically in the Ultimate Team mode, is very fast-paced and is constant end-to-end action. It is currently very hard to defend as many players use quick, fast dribbling players to dance their way into scoring positions. Many games end up with at least 5 goals and usually more, so much so that patches have already made their way into the game to try and give the defenders a chance. But these patches are a common occurrence in this series and end up being a gameplay whack-a-mole. Soon I am sure they will make defending much easier, which means fewer goals and more tight games, and then the consensus will be it’s now too hard to score. Another patch will make it easier to score by making shots more accurate or attackers stronger on the ball. It will eventually hit that sweet spot where there are few complaints, and then sadly they will make another change to spoil it and spend the rest of the game’s lifespan trying to get back to that sweet spot.

It is fun to play, and for most football fans, everyone has a desire to be the best at the game for bragging rights with their friends. Everyone has that opinion of what formation works best and what players are hidden gems in the game. The longevity of the game is usually always a yearlong for most hardened fans until the next game is released. Even in their Ultimate Team mode, there is always a drop-off at the end of the season where even the casual players have overpowered teams, and those that spend real money actually have to get better at the game to have a chance at winning, and so they lose interest.

If I had to say what the main drawback is, I would say it is that hackers are still prominent in the game and EA do not take it anywhere near seriously enough. I play on the Xbox Series X, and since crossplay came into action, it was exciting for a short spell; to beat PlayStation players just made victories that much sweeter. This experience was impacted by PC players who added too many cheats to the game. From causing instant disconnections to the opponent, to making the players stand still while their teams score freely, or to your players reduced to the slowest speed so you cannot play fairly. I had experienced all of them, so I turn off crossplay every time now as I heard it’s still happening. But console players are no longer safe, as I experienced 2 instant disconnections after the game kicks off which caused me to take a loss, which is highly frustrating. The pathetic part from EA is that they have a form for reporting these actions. But they don’t tell you the outcome and hide behind a privacy protection statement, which is garbage. It would be like reporting a murder of a loved one and showing the evidence of the person doing it only to be told by the authorities they will take action, but they won’t tell you what action was taken or if they did anything at all. I have only experienced it twice, and even that’s annoying, but I would still recommend console players to turn off crossplay until EA does something about it.

Conclusion

EAFC 26 is still the leading football simulation game in the world, and it’s not even close. It’s a shame there is no real competition to keep them on their toes. They are keeping with the ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ mantra and appeasing their biggest money maker by putting a large amount of focus on the Ultimate Team game mode. They have made just enough graphical and gameplay changes so it can be considered a new game, but barely.  

This game was reviewed based on the Xbox Series S/X release played on Series S|X. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. The reviewer purchased the title.