FIFA 08 reviewed on All About N-Gage

[slitchfield]

Over on our sister site All About N-Gage, Ewan has reviewed FIFA 08, pronouncing it great for both novices and footie fanatics, praising the crisp graphics and training touches in particular. The only downside was though to be the lack of multi-player options.

Read on in the full article.

[krisse]

I have to say I was pretty impressed with it as well, and I'm not normally a football game fan either.

It's got a really good tutorial when you play your first match that explains all the game mechanics, so you don't feel overwhelmed by the options at your disposal.

The lack of Bluetooth is pretty weird, especially now that N-Gage is available on such a large number of devices. None of the new N-Gage games seem to have Bluetooth yet, perhaps Nokia is having problems implementing it on the new platform?

the last game (worth playing) that used bluetooth for multiplayer was made more than 2 years ago. K-Rally of 2006 didn't have this feature and nothing ever since let it be racing or strategy game.

I suppose developers just can't be bothered any more.

[viipottaja]

Interesting contract to the Pocket Gamer review that gave only 6/10.

[krisse]

Viipottaja, I get the feeling the Pocket Gamer review was intended for people who are very experienced with portable football games. Ewan was writing from the perspective of a more casual user who doesn't normally play them. That might help explain the difference.

[viipottaja]

Could well be. If it is very slow as PG implied, that might get annoying over time though.

[krisse]

I didn't feel it was slow, but then I'm not someone who usually plays football games. If it had been any faster I would have been put off playing it. :-)

I think EA have the right idea. Phone games are far more likely to reach casual users than console games, so it was a little unfair of PG to compare this to console versions of FIFA (though their comparisons to other phone games are perfectly fine of course).

[Ewan]

viipottaja

Yes it is an interesting contrast, and I think Krisse nails it - we didn't review this as 'hardcore gamers,' and if we were to, we'd have to hand it over to someone that plays football games at that hardcore level - something Pocket Gamer can do.

And reviews are personal - I doubt the reviews team would agree on all the reviews we post, and there have been occasions where arguing for the scores or the thrust of a review has taken up longer than it took to write the initial review.

But in any case, thanks for your comments, and thanks for understanding there is no one right answeer to 'how good a game is!;

Hey Steve maybe you should do a comparison of the FIFA 08 and the FIFA 07. Ive played them both on my N95 and I cant see the difference

i have an N81 8GB and I find it quite frustrating to play as I can't seem to be able to map any of the controls to the gaming keys at the top of the phone, so in landscape mode I can only press the middle button to do everything, which works surprisingly well but some gaming key access would have been appreciated

Mind you mine is the Trial Version, and considering I live in Australia I don't think I will be getting FIFA 08 for free anytime soon :(