Electronic Arts Sports Football Club 27 is reviewed.

EA Sports FC 27 adds three city hubs in The Grounds while slowing match play and shifting overall ratings

Background: A yearly football franchise reaches for a social hub

EA Sports FC 27 arrives on the same annual schedule that has long defined its biggest rival, Call of Duty. Both are products of vast publishers, both grind and shunt their way through a yearly release cycle, and both have featured the likenesses of Lionel Messi, Neymar Jr., and Paul Pogba. The comparison is not only cosmetic. For Activision, the single-player campaign increasingly looks weary and wan next to Warzone. For EA, the fundamental exhibition match and the Career mode have given way to Ultimate Team.

The football game also carries a practical monopoly that is more or less unchallenged. That position gives EA room to make smaller changes than it did in earlier years, and in previous years it has done a lot less than this. The most touching addition this year is an online social hub called The Grounds. A custom avatar can roam and rise there. The appeal is not only the play, which lets players challenge others to rounds of Rush football while the ghosts of Volta and Fifa Street happily haunt the mode. It is the look: three open hub areas to explore, one styled on the UK, another on Paris, and a third on Argentina. The streets are clean and cluttered by bustling non-player characters. Luminous white-domed kiosks appear here and there, with the promise of an artist's impression of an upcoming Heathrow terminal.

The design is so close to an older social gaming experiment that it can seem the developers at EA Vancouver and EA Romania were paying homage to PlayStation Home. There, players could also walk through weird streets and glassy booths, wear store-bought clothes, and beat other players in mini-games of all kinds. There, too, there was a looming threat of shutdown. Whether The Grounds will last is not certain, but there is fleeting fun to be had. The mode is already tied to a wider conversation about how EA's yearly football releases evolve after launch. In FC 25, the close-control dribble gave players the ability to rend chasms in an opposing team's press, and the annual pattern has been one in which EA tunes gameplay up and slows it down over several after-launch patches, while players speed it back up again and bend innovations toward exploitative silliness. Signs suggest FC 27 may yet suffer from an equivalent quirk in the off-balance dribble. Certain attackers gain the power of the Weeble: to wobble and not fall down under pressure, slipping through a defender's rough jostle and staggering onward. It looks great and stressfully animated, though a player may feel stressed after suffering it about thirty times.

Development: The Grounds, Authentic Gameplay, and new on-pitch tools

An FC 27 trailer shows The Grounds in action. Rush is five-a-side, but the hub also offers one-on-one, two-on-two, and three-on-three modes. Queuing is zippy, though occasional lag can undo it. Alongside Rush, the mode includes goofy distractions such as Balloon Ball, Bocce Ball, and Bucket Ball. Bucket Ball is a basketball twist that has players dink high and dippy shots into a hoop. These diversions do not offer much nourishment. The review suggests that a partnership with Sega could add staying power, imagining frenzied rounds of Monkey Target with AiAi and his pals. For more sober fare, Clubhouse Matches offer full eleven-a-side games, though players can more quickly play traditional online exhibitions.

The Grounds are shaky, but the good news this year is that the core on-pitch action has been tuned up and slowed down. At the outset, FC 27 asks players to choose between Competitive Gameplay, which “favours speed, responsiveness, and reliable outcomes,” and Authentic Gameplay, “a new, slower-paced, more measured experience.” With Authentic Gameplay, matches have a weightier texture. There is greater emphasis on manual defending and far less help from AI teammates. Teammate Contain now means AI defenders mark an attacking player but keep a greater distance, giving the player more time to switch to the right defender and take on the task manually. Switching to the desired defender is intuitive, and snuffing out an attack with clever positioning feels good. Through balls are harder to pull off, while lobbed versions are currently in favour online. Matches play out in midfield with pleasing heft, and scoring a goal carries a crunchy, thrilling sensation through the white ripple and the hum and shake of the stadium.

EA has also rejigged set pieces. Corner kicks are slower and more cerebral. After the kick is taken, the camera zooms into the box, and players can make runs or shield the ball. The biggest change this year is Avoidance. Holding a shoulder button makes the chosen player more slippy; like Altaïr in Assassin's Creed, they nudge and shimmy through crowds. It is a lively addition and adds a tactical edge. Crossing is looser, with the ball more likely to find its way into a general area, so players must measure crosses, aim accurately, and develop a sense for pace and space.

Another named update is Attacking Spatial Awareness, which supposedly makes attacking teammates more likely to make intelligent runs into propitious lanes of offence rather than crowded pockets. In hands-on play, it can be hit and miss: a player may pinball passes around midfield before noticing a teammate making a curving run away from the action. The review frames this with a joke about Bruno Fernandes having a keener sense than the writer for where a pass should go.

Team authenticity also shapes the match experience. A Spain versus Argentina exhibition feels like a meeting of the Bolshoi Ballet and the cast of Rockstar's The Warriors after two yellow cards, a pulled shirt, and a hard shove. The presentation, however, is less convincing. A meeting between Middlesbrough and Newcastle begins with a satellite shot of the Earth diving in cyber-zoom to St. James' Park, as if it were the site of the next assignment for Captain Price and the merry men of Task Force 141.

Latest progress: Ultimate Team, career changes, and the current stage

Ultimate Team remains as morally murky and spirit-sapping as ever. The debate over whether it constitutes gambling has been aired, and various countries have arrived at different conclusions. The technical answer from the UK Gambling Commission is no: because virtual items lack a mechanism to be cashed out for real currency, it is not gambling. In an interesting development, Pan-European Game Information has certified the game a 16+, the first such certificate in the series, for its use of loot boxes. Victor Zagury, a Parisian lawyer who challenged EA in court, told L'Équipe, about people hooked on Ultimate Team: “It is the logic of a casino that has entered their homes.”

In FC 27, Ultimate Team is largely unchanged. Players buy packs of random cards with either earned FC Coins or real money, assemble squads, complete objectives, and battle other players online. The two most notable changes are the Gallery and the way squad-building challenges work. The Gallery lets players array cards as they would in a sticker book and earn Gallery Tokens, which can be spent on kits and badges. As players and items pass through an Ultimate Team club, they can be enshrined in the Gallery. It is one part memory catalogue and one part deck builder. Players can curate the Gallery into sets such as clubs and nations, and these sets are graded. The Gallery is designed to deepen the essential draw of Ultimate Team, but it feels surplus to requirements.

The more meaningful change is the speed of squad-building challenges. They have been part of Ultimate Team for years, but in FC 27 they are faster. Instead of concentrating on a squad's chemistry or its overall rating, players can submit items simply based on rarity and ratings. The system uses the same grade-scoring method as the Gallery. This allows partial progress faster, because players do not need to worry about the full requirements of every challenge. The tweak brings quicker gratification and a more regular drip of reward. For those who love the mode, Ultimate Team remains moreish, frustrating, and brain-crackling, like nicotine.

For players who prefer to stay away from Ultimate Team and perhaps sidestep the ethical rumpus, the Manager and Player Career modes have welcome tweaks. One of this year's better changes is a dynamic overall-rating system. Players have strong baseline abilities; Dani Olmo is never going to plummet to a level where he would be happier in a Sunday League, but his form will surge and slump as matches wear on. Injuries, play time, and teammate rivalries can cause a player's rating to shift. The result is a freer, more organic feel over the season. A squad can punch above its own weight when several players perform above their usual form, and success can be hampered when ratings fall, forcing strategic changes.

Transfers are now slower. Players must check with other clubs to see which deals are actually possible, then negotiate a price, whether monetary, through player swaps, or with bonuses. Other clubs can swoop in and foment a bidding war. Negotiations now take place in a dedicated and zippy menu. The process shows a tension meter: high tension means talks may break down, while low tension means they are more likely to progress smoothly. Players can negotiate with clubs and with players directly, and they can opt to pay in installments, useful when a budget is tight but a club needs an injection of star power.

Signing fees and agent fees complicate proceedings further. A club can be low-balled with an offer but sweetened by a clutter of bonuses. An extra five million may appear if the player qualifies for the Champions League. Another couple million may appear if the player makes over ten appearances. There is pleasure in sifting through these variables, cleaning up a club's finances through shrewd business, or acting like a bastard. Slicing down an agent's fee or a weekly wage, leveraging a player's desire to join or their apathy toward a rival club trying to outbid you, can raise tension while making the user feel like Gordon Gekko on the beach with one of those mobile phones the size of a shoe. Random events also intrude: an email may inform the manager that the centre forward injured his hand in a cooking mishap at home, turning an all-too-foolhardy attempt at risotto into another threat alongside opposing managers and club debt.

The current stage of EA Sports FC 27 is therefore mixed but concrete. The Grounds come across as frippery, and Ultimate Team rumbles ever on, but the football itself has been tuned: slower, weightier, and more manual in its best moments. The game adds three city hubs, new social distractions, and a series of changes to match play, set pieces, transfers, and ratings. With a practical monopoly more or less unchallenged, EA could do less than this. For once, it has done more than it did in several previous years, even if the most touching part of the package still feels like a hub waiting to see whether it can survive.