Cup is the tournament mode of the game. There are various regional cups, and the International Cup, which is the facsimile of the World Cup. My nagging complaint with the Cup Mode is that there are no cup qualifying matches. This makes your tournament opponents feel very arbitrary.
Xbox Live mode is not very feature filled. You can choose a player match or a ranked match. A player match does not affect your points ranking, but a ranked match does. Similar to Mario Kart Wii you start with 5000 points and gain or lose them depending on your play. A neat feature of this mode is that you are placed in a division based on your ranking.
My big beef with the online mode is that there is no smart player match up. There is no easy way to search for a match with someone in your division or near your ranking points. You can create a custom match and then choose your opponents. You can see their stats when you do this, but it is an extraneous step you should not have to take. Most often I ended up playing someone much better than me, but that might have as much to do with the hardcore nature of the game.
The other problem with online play is the lag. At times the ball will skip a head a few feet. This almost always costs you possession. At least once I played someone who exploited the lag to a ridiculous degree.
The games graphics and audio are mediocre. The player details are decent, but not great. Beckham and Ronaldinho are instantly recognizable, but they do not have minute details. In most views the camera is too zoomed out to show distinguishing traits. The crowd looks ridiculous as it is some kind of terrible mix of 3-D and 2-D models.
The commentary is actually quite good. It keeps up with the action surprisingly well. The commentary could be improved even more if there was player and team specific sound bites. That is the highlight of the audio. No on the pitch chatter can be heard. The crowd is not as responsive as it could be. It cheers at the typical cheering times, but it rarely boos a bad call, and never breaks out in player or team specific chants.
Even though Master League and Xbox Live Modes have their problems, if you enjoy the game, you can enjoy it for a long while. Trying to move up the rankings in Xbox Live is appealing, and achievement junkies will have to complete a lot of games to unlock all of them. I have played the game quite a bit, and fully intend on continuing to play until I at least get that 100 games achievement.
All in all the game is not an improvement over previous versions. In fact the controls do not work as well as previous-gen versions. Online play, Master League, and Cup modes all need to improve to be more user-friendly.
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