Five bucks for FIFA

I love soccer, and I kind of need a soccer video game in my life. For years I went from Pro-Evo release to release until around the early 2000s when EAs FIFA finally eclipsed Konami's offering. But the last few years FIFA has been on a steady, money grabbing decline and I've become more and more hesitant to go down that road. Last year I was badly burned by FIFA 21 which became, in my opinion, unplayable after only a few matches. The AI was apparently irrevocably broken and EA never to my knowledge even tried to produce a fix. 

Another year, another FIFA, but no way I was going to dump more money down the drain on a broken game, fool me once... So what to do? Pro-Evo was re-imagined this year as eFootball and it is barely even a game. While FIFA 21 was a complete game, but broken. eFootball isn't even complete. It's a minimum viable product and even for free, isn't worth the hard drive space it takes up. So how do I test the FIFA waters again without getting burned? There's no demo for the game to sample, and boy how I miss those days...

Enter, EA Play and the 10 hour FIFA trial. For 5 bucks and a 1-month subscription, I could dip my toe into the FIFA 22 AI and see if last year's debacle had been fixed. The verdict: after a few hours into my trial and a couple of teams in different levels/league in career mode things are looking good. Good enough I dropped the $48 on the Black Friday sale (ends today!) to snag it via the PSN. 

Looking through the EA Play games list I can't see a reason to really continue the subscription beyond the first month. If I was really into the EA catalogue then the Play Pro subscription might make sense. It's $100 for the year but would get me unlimited time on those latest releases, not just the 10 hours with the standard subscription. But I'm not interested in following the EA release calendar. I just needed to know another swipe of the credit card on FIFA wasn't going to end up with the intense buyer's remorse of last year and one month of standard did that trick.

Five bucks well spent, that.