FIFA 07

This one has been 4,293 days in the making in terms of a completion. I obviously haven’t been playing it for that long, but I was recently looking for a monotonous game to work on while preparing for an exam and FIFA games tend to fit the bill for this.

Now the first thing I noticed is how much worse it is than future FIFA titles, including FIFA 08. The engine that drives FIFA 07 is terrible and the football that comes off it feels more luck-based than skill-based in terms of scoring, passing, making tackles and pretty much everything football related. My favourite one was the ref blowing for a free kick every time my player went anywhere near the opponent, but when they make a late sliding challenge and my player goes off injured, that’s fine.

Scoring is another major component that feels luck-based. I was reminded a little bit of my time with FIFA 2006 World Cup where on the harder difficulties, the only sure-fire way to score goals was to chip the goal keeper. In this game, it doesn’t really matter what type of shot you use, it’s RNG on where it will go. Towards the end of my game, I realised there was a sweet spot where if you shot just as the keeper comes out, it will result in a goal most of the time. But because of the ludicrously shit touches your player takes before you get in position, most of the time the keeper just picks the ball off your feet.

With the power of hindsight, FIFA 08 made some vast improvements to the game engine which makes the game much more playable. At the time of release, however, this wasn’t known, and FIFA 07 was just another average football game where the only redeeming quality over Pro Evolution Soccer was the fact it’s fully licensed.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

FIFA 07 was released in October 2006 and knowing the state of my life at the time (university where local football co-op was a must) I assume I bought it quite close to release. So why has it taken so long for me to complete?

The first reason is one that still annoys me even though I’ve finished the game. There is an achievement for getting an average of 4 goals per game over 50 games. In terms of real football, this is stupid because no team in history (in sensible leagues) has ever achieved this. Anyway, to top it off, in the game, this was heavily glitched. I kept a spreadsheet to track my progress and when I got to an average of 4 goals per game in my last 50 games, no achievement. This was at some point in 2007 so it took me 11 years to get over the injustice.

Anyway, during that first period of playing the game some 11 years ago, I did manage to unlock achievements for going a season unbeaten, going 20 games without a card, having a 60 game winning streak and earning 50 man of the match for midfielders. So in terms of achievement numbers, I was half way there.

When I started my campaign for completion, goal getter was the first on the list. I set my game times to 20-minute halves and I played as awesome teams against rubbish ones and tried to get 20 plus goals per match. I kept track and scored easily over 200 goals in 15 matches, but it still didn’t unlock. I’m not sure what the game is looking at for stats, but I had nearly averaged 4 goals per game over 150-odd games when it eventually unlocked for me.

Other than the goal getter achievement, the list is pretty straight forward. You have to get another 50 man of the match awards for defenders and strikers and all of this needs to be done on semi professional difficulty. That’s exactly semi professional difficulty. You don’t get anything for playing on a higher difficulty which I found out the hard way as you also have to win 20 matches as the World Eleven team on Professional. I tried getting defender man of the matches here by passing the ball around at the back when I had the lead… but none of them counted. This is a bit stupid seeing as it’s supposed to be harder to play on Professional but whatever… because of the last achievement.

The last achievement is for winning 300 matches. In play time alone, that 40 hours if you play on the smallest time of 4 minutes a half and that doesn’t include added time, stoppages and loading screens. In addition to this, do not ever let your controller turn off. If you do, you will go back to side selection and the match won’t count. This only happened to me once, but it was still really irritating.

Downloadable Content – N/A

FIFA 07 is not the best football game you can play and it’s not a quick completion either. It also feels very unrewarding for what it is with only 11 achievements. The big gap between the 300 wins and everything else is demoralising. If it wasn’t for taking a break for exam preparation, I don’t think I would have made it.