UFL Preview: Impressions from the second beta

Maybe I'm being a little harsh on FIFA/EA Sports FC. Out of 100 reviews of last year's entry on Metacritic, mine is the only negative one, as I gave a 4/10 to last year's EA Sports FC 24. Fair or not, I'm certainly a man of the people, as the series' downfall has also resulted in increasingly frustrated user reviews. I'm not going to spend time listing all the series' flaws, because this isn't about EA Sports FC. No, I'll just conclude that EA's focus on unrealistic arcade-style gameplay and P2W in Ultimate Team has created a thirst for competition - especially since Konami's eFootball series (formerly Pro Evolution Soccer) isn't exactly in top shape either.

On September 12, UFL will finally be released. A football game with more than eight years of development time and an investment from Cristiano Ronaldo himself. A few weeks ago, the game's second beta was made available, and as a fallen FIFA fanatic, I of course had to try it out.

Like in Ultimate Team, you don't play as a real team, but instead create - and slowly improve - your own club. Before the first whistle, you can choose one of four 'stars' to form the core of your future team. I use quotation marks here because neither Ronaldo nor Roberto Firmino shine that brightly anymore, and the Arsenal left-back Oleksandr Zinchenko has never been close to true stardom. I therefore chose Kevin de Bruyne, the only proper world class player, and quickly came to regret it as Ronaldo scored against me in almost every game.

A messy game of football as Ronaldo shines

First impressions were definitely not positive, and it wasn't only because of my nemesis Ronaldo. Sure, the player models are quite nice and the animations are acceptable, but AI has always been the most important element of a football game, and UFL falls far short in this respect. The goalkeepers make plenty of mistakes, and the midfielders in particular often run around confused, torn between the impulse to defend and the impulse to make offensive runs. The defenders don't have an easy time either. Their overall positioning is okay, but when they have to deal with both a through ball and a chasing opponent, they sometimes have a minor breakdown and refuse to go for the ball at all. The result is a messy game of football - not unlike when children play - where many players clump together in a small area, leaving a big gap for the attackers to run in. As a result, most of my goals were scored from through balls and there wasn't a lot of neat build-up play initially.

In all fairness, it's much better than the latest beta, at least judging from the YouTube clips I've seen of it. Few sports are as complex as football, where you don't find the same template-cut attacking patterns as in basketball and American football, for example. So I recognise that honing the AI is difficult, and as I said, there are clear improvements to be seen. But here, a month before the full launch, there is still a long way to go, and unfortunately there are also many sloppy errors in the presentation. For example, the linesman doesn't show the flag when an offside call is made until the following cutscene, and when watching a highlight in slow motion, the stadium scoreboard shows the current time and score, not what it was during the moment that is being replayed.

Fair to Play

The first logo your team has contains the slogan 'Fair to Play,' which also seems to be the developer's mantra. However, it's not immediately visible on the pitch. The referees generously hand out thin penalties, but refuse to hand out yellow and red cards, even for the most blatant fouls. In fact, the referee's line resembles a curve of seismic waves in the middle of an earthquake. This is another area where the game's AI needs an overhaul. But - and this is worth noting - it's not the actual game on the pitch that the slogan refers to. No, it's obviously a jab at EA and their unfair mechanics in Ultimate Team in particular.

Now, your opinion might differ, but it is my personal experience that EA Sports FC often pits you against a player who has a far better team than you. Whether this is a way of incentivising you to spend money on better players or just bad matchmaking, I can't say, but the fact is that once you face a team with Messi, Mbappé and Ronaldo in their in-form, legend, 99-rated versions, well, there's not much you can do to survive - especially as defending has become somewhat of an impossibility in EA's series.

Again, it's only a beta, so there's still a lot of tweaking to be done, but the progression and matchmaking in UFL actually seems quite fair. You don't buy your players through card packs; instead, they have a fixed price in a currency you can earn by playing, and I was quickly able to afford a pretty decent team. Your players automatically get better as you use them, and star players don't cost a fortune. There's even a sort of salary cap depending on your ranking, so you can't just fill a team with superstars before you have proven yourselves with lesser players. I never met a team with too good of a win ratio compared to my own, and even when my opponent was actually a bit stronger than me on paper, I always had a decent chance of winning.

Solid defense might not win the title

Earlier, I mentioned that Ronaldo initially made life difficult for me. He never really stopped banging in the goals, as he's one of the highest rated players in the game (you have to get something out of your investment I guess), but slowly I got to grips with him and the other strikers. You can actually defend in UFL, and it's thanks to this simple fact that the game, despite its many, many flaws, in some ways is more entertaining than EA Sports FC. First of all, passes are not heat-seeking missiles and you actually have an opportunity to intercept them with a little foresight. But the main reason is that after each touch of the ball, there is a small window for the defender to steal the ball - this is unfortunately extremely difficult in EA Sports FC, where every player can easily make 4-5 touches or turns per second. By slowly mastering both defense and attacking play, I improved my win ratio, but above all I actually had a decent amount of fun, despite the game's many issues.

That said, UFL is in a somewhat raw state a month before its launch. The question is whether there are enough eFootball and EA Sports FC dropouts to create a market, because there's no doubt that the game still needs a lot more than a month of work to compete with Konami and EA's series. Hopefully the Fair to Play model can buy them enough time and goodwill to actually improve the core mechanics. Otherwise, the developers will have to rely on Ronaldo reaching into his pockets once again, because UFL will probably need a lot of time and money thrown at it before it gets really good.