Story of Qualifying takes the place of the regular challenge mode, allowing you to replay classic qualifying and tournament moments, all while trying to meet certain in-game requirements. It’s not as steep or as confusing as FIFA 08’s challenge mode, but it will provide soccer fans with another enjoyable, yet testing game play mode. This is especially true for fans of countries that lost close games, as you’ll get the chance to change the outcome via the various challenges. Yes that includes you, Portugal fans. You get another shot at taking down Greece in the Euro 2004 Final.
The notorious A.I. from the FIFA series seems to have been tamed here, as games on harder difficulties feel a little easier, but not by much. In FIFA 08, I couldn’t even get the ball past the opposing team’s defense on semi-pro difficulty, as they’d always cut me off and somehow were able to dodge every tackle I tried making on them. It’s not nearly as bad in Euro 2008, but it’s still near-impossible to win in higher difficulties.
Sadly, not everything is so happy and wonderful. While the graphics and sound are no different than they have been in the past few years, a number of graphical issues plague this game. The most sinister of these is a mysterious “fog” that shows up sometimes after resetting the ball for throw-ins or free kicks. It blocks out a huge part of the screen with squiggly black lines, and in one case, made players from the opposing team turn invisible. I’m not sure if this is because I got a bad copy or if this is an issue across all Euro 2008 discs, but it is incredibly annoying when it happens and does so more frequently than I am comfortable with. There are a number of smaller glitches as well, whether it’s sudden loud bursts of fans cheering coming out over my speakers before matches or countries’ flags regularly disappearing from the fixtures and tables screen.
Online play is as you might expect from an EA Sports title. You have your online leagues, your ranked and unranked matches, and so on. Getting online and finding opponents to play against is a bit harder, since most of the people playing this title are overseas in Europe and there's a bit of a time difference, but there are a small number of North American players I spotted online. It’s pretty much the same shell we saw with FIFA 08 on the Xbox 360. One new addition is Euro Online Knockout Cup mode, which sets up a 16-player online tournament for the Euro 2008 title. The best part is that games can be played whenever an opponent is on, so no more marathon sessions of gaming. The tournament also won't move into the next round without all the current matches played, meaning someone can't skip ahead to the finals if there's still a first-round match underway.
Article comments