FIFA Street 3

David West takes it to the street with oddly proportioned football players.

EA’s FIFA Street series is all about breaking the ‘beautiful game’ down to its bare essentials and jazzing them up to the Nth degree. Gone are apparently silly rules such as offside and fouls in favour of five players on each side performing the most over the top tricks in an urban environment. The third edition of the series is the strongest offering yet and offers up locations such as Oil rigs, playgrounds and rooftops just waiting to be climbed upon and back flipped off in order to…well basically to look cool.

The emphasis is firmly placed on this over the top trickery as opposed to the strategic and more realistic offerings of its big brother FIFA and the Pro Evolution series. This premise enables pretty much anyone to jump in whether they appreciate football or not.



While this simplified football is good fun, the execution is somewhat flawed and wastes a lot of the game’s great potential. For an idea that relies so much on twitch movement, flowing passes and trick sets, the controls are not nearly responsive enough and limit what the player can do. Players move quite slowly and the general pace of the game is slower than sports fans might expect. Despite this, when it comes off, it really works; stringing a rapid succession of passes and flicks between players ended by a thundering bicycle kick into the back of the net is extremely satisfying and it’s here that the game really shines.

Stringing these tricks together fills up the ‘Gamebreaker’ bar; when filled this gives your team enhanced abilities for a limited time and, when utilised properly, can make you an unstoppable scoring machine. For a game aiming for the type of circus street football made famous in countries like Brazil, there is however a noticeable lack of tricks, and those that are in place can feel slightly artificial at times, with the ball feeling like it is on a string rather than being a fluid part of the action.



The core of the single player game is the challenge mode. In this mode you progress through matches by achieving set tasks, like scoring a set amount of goals in a given time frame, scoring using only headers, volleys or the gamebreaker power ups. These are played against teams broken down into player groups such as stocky, fast, and young, with each providing a different challenge based on their strengths and weaknesses. The single player is quite shallow, though, and gets somewhat repetitive as you progress to the latter stages.

Local and online multiplayer is great fun and adds to the foundations laid in the single player game. It might be great to mix it up with a human opponent running up walls and out tricking each other, but the pacing and control issues hold it back from being the all-in trick and brag fest that the game could have been.



FIFA Street 3’s visuals, at least, match the game’s over-the-top leanings. The exotic playing locations are visually interesting and unique; they’re well realised and contain a fair amount of depth and background detail that really suit each location. The more than 250 player models are stylised representations of their real life counterparts and look quite fresh and in tune with the rest of the game. Peter Crouch, for example is really tall and lanky while players such as Viduka and Rooney look like they’ve been plucked out of some weird cell-shaded version of the Madden series.

In game sound effects are average and pretty much what you would expect in terms of grunts, squeaking shoes and power up sound effects. In typical EA fashion the soundtrack is quite strong and goes along with the on field action admirably.



Overall FIFA Street 3 is a solid, fun game that is still a story of wasted potential. It is a vast improvement over the first two games, though, and with tweaking of the game’s pace and control, the inevitable future revisions could really hit the mark.