FIFA 23 For Xbox Series X

FIFA is dead; long live FIFA. EA’s football simulation behemoth has returned for one last hurrah after a nasty public divorce with its licensor, calling itself ‘The World’s Game’ ahead of a painful name change to EA Sports FC, coming next year. But the tagline transcends its bittersweet pomp because, for all intents and purposes, FIFA 23 fittingly does feel like the same game the world has been playing for the past few years, with its reliable end-to-end gameplay and familiar frustrations.

Even at the end of an era, FIFA 23 marks another year of careful attrition from EA, as several tactical and aesthetic revisions supplement its sturdy gameplay blueprint. Yet it’s also an entry that feels both propped up and consumed by its Ragnarok status, begrudgingly pulling down a ruby-red final curtain as the football game genre descends into a maelstrom of chaos.

Theatrical additions to gameplay, like the ferocious Power Shots, ensure that the FIFA name goes out with a bang rather than a whimper. Holding the bumpers and pressing shoot turns your striker into a raid boss with an interruptible attack, the camera pulling focus as they leather the ball, sending bootstrap shockwaves booming through the PS5’s controller speaker. If you get the angle wrong, FIFA 23’s newly improved acrobatic goalkeepers might be able to stop it with their individually simulated fingers, which have saved my bacon on a few occasions.

Get it right, though, and if the forward has enough space, it’s likely to end up in the back of the net, regardless of how far out you are. This meta-shaking type of shot teases out the halcyon days of Francesco Totti hit-and-hope long shots seen in early 2010s FIFA, but don’t worry; online multiplayer is still plagued with speedy wingers passing it across the box on the break. Why try and have fun, eh?
While it can’t escape the series’ perennial problem of being over-reliant on pacey players entirely, FIFA 23 does reward careful execution across the board. My fingers hurt from pulling the triggers to jockey dangerous counter-attacks, and the intensity of a pass has to be fine-tuned, which is hard to master but satisfying when you place the perfect through ball. Rogue tackles will also leave you wide open, as holding down the associated buttons for too long can lead to a dangerous, crunching commitment that sometimes pays off – but, more often than not, it leads to a nail-biting penalty. This turns tackling with the last man back into a risky but inherently thrilling endeavour.