FIFA Street 3 review

Remember those adverts with a bunch of famous footballers doing fancy tricks before cleverly passing the ball onto the next player? Well, this is the video game equivalent of that. Fifa Street 3 is a release as much about fancy moves and clever tricks as it is about scoring goals, and despite Gamestyle having our reservations about its quality we found it strangely appealing.

Words by Adam Gulliver , playing on a Microsoft Xbox 360.

Fifa Street 3 is all about using the right stick to perform flicks, drags and an assortment of other moves. Just moving it in a direction will result in your player dragging the ball with his feet, push it towards your opponent and its possible to do a special flip, which in turn fills up your gamebreaker gauge and never has a name been more apt. Fifa Street can sometimes degenerate into a race to get the gamebreaker first because whoever does obtains an insane advantage. When its active, shots become super powerful, goalkeepers incredibly difficult to beat and to top it all of you have improved tackling and speed. The balance of the game is completely ruined, thankfully there is an option to turn it off, although that doesnt help improve the challenge mode.The challenge mode is perhaps the closest thing in the game to a career. There are nine different tournaments each with a set number of challenges to be completed. Unfortunately the challenges arent the most diverse. Theyre either simply score as many goals in the allotted time, score the most headers or volleys, reach a score limit, score the most gamebreaker goals or be the first to get a three goal advantage. The challenge mode isnt even a lengthy affair with most people being able to complete it in a weekend, thankfully the online mode does make up for its single player shortcomings. Much like Fifa 08 the online mode is seamless with zero lag and plenty of fun to be had. Our personal favourite being the Playground Picks mode. Here each player takes turns in picking a player to add to their squad, which brought back memories of our school days (and also always being picked last). Something that stands out with Fifa Street 3 is the visual style. Looking like The Incredibles, each player is drawn in a very cartoon style, some of which are absolutely hilarious. Just watching lanky beanpole Crouch do overhead kicks is a bizarre yet amazing sight and the whole ink-blot presentation (which seems to be favourite with developers at the moment) is quite striking. Shame that the music is typical Lady Sovereign-style hip hop, chav rubbish.What stood out in our mind while playing the game is that it feels a little bit random. Tackles can be incredibly useless at times and it often feels like successfully challenging someone for the ball comes down to luck rather than skill. At times we swear we could actually see our players legs ghost through the opposition when we went to make the tackle and theres a certain move where you can sidestep opponents if you flick the right thumbstick in their direction. This can also be quite random in how often it actually works. Defending is a problem because the tackles that we mentioned arent of the sliding variety. Instead they make stupid looking legsweeps like theyre a character from Mortal Kombat, so you need to get right in front of the player for it to work.Fifa Street 3 certainly kept us hooked for a while. It has an excellent online mode, but is let down by its single player shortcomings. Its a competent title if you like an arcade equivalent to the usual simulation football titles, but dont expect it to entertain for long.