Having seen the great character models and animations on games from EA Sports like NFL and NBA I was shocked when I saw them in FIFA 10. With all the motion capture technology and super high-powered facilities at EA Sports it seems like they almost completely skipped that and are treating FIFA and football (the world’s most popular sport) like second-rate entries with less than 100% attention to detail.

In fact, I believe that at times, Gepeto could have created more realistic movements than EA Sports did in FIFA 10. It’s astounding how unrealistic some of the character models and animations are. But perhaps it’s simply because I am playing the game as a Czech team in the Czech league and they just couldn’t be bothered to make realistic models for such a small market. Even then, they’re still painful to see.

While that was the first thing that struck me when I started playing the game I was equally struck by the horrible camera which lacks alot of fine-tuning and often positions itself so far away that you can barely see your player if you’re on anything less than a 25 inch screen.  That’s not to say FIFA 10 is a bad game, because it’s not. But I am no super fan, so bear with me on this.

FIFA 10 brings with it several new features - ball control, better player AI, new game modes and better control over your character. But your Be a Pro character and your virtual professional characters are completely separate and even if you want to make basically the same player, you have to do it twice. Why there’s not a save as template function so that you can copy over to your other player is beyond me. What’s the difference you ask? Well it’s basically your single player campaign player (Be a Pro) and your online player (Virtual Pro). I can see the need for the separation of the two as someone might play whole seasons in a day and then upgrade their player before going online and being harder, faster, stronger, better like Daft Punk said.