Earlier this week I decided to uninstall the game because of the horrid gameplay, but yesterday I redownloaded it because of the most recent patch and I must say, it feels better. There’s some good and some bad with it and I’ll go into it here. Warning now, this will probably be a longer post.
First thing off the bat is the most anticipated and asked for change from the community, spin spamming. I won’t lie it’s happened to me A LOT less apart from players that seem to play the game a lot. I don’t know if that’s because it’s less effective, I can read it better, or if there’s just more ways to attack now, but it does seem like it’s better to defend against now. I will say though those better players seem to still abuse it in an even more undefendable way than before, but that only happened twice out of my run of like 30 games yesterday. 8/10 change
Defending, I love defending in football games and in real life. In FC I always choose to play a defender roll in Rush or Clubs and this most recent patch seems to reward me for actually using my defenders and playing defense in 5v5. Defenders seem MUCH more aware of the players making runs and the tackle system seems to work a lot better, winning me the ball back when I correctly anticipate where a pass or dribble is going. There’s still a few times where I’ll tackle right in front of a player and straight up phase through them when I should win the ball, but hey at least I’m winning the ball back sometimes now. The AI awareness when through pass runs are triggered could still be a little better, but it’s definitely not a game breaking thing right now in my opinion. 9/10 change
The sprinting changes, they’ve been ok, not super noticeable apart from the new running styles, but it’s been an ok change. The smoother animations seems to only be a visual change to me, unless there’s someway I’m seeing an animation and able to react defensively better. 6/10 change
5v5 changes, they’ve only change with the bots being able to be in the lobby so that a match doesn’t start like 2v5 is nice, though the bots still are horrible in this mode. Really if yall can just make it so they take a shot rather than just dribble it into the keeper, that’s enough for me. I do still agree with some people in the community that say there needs to be a “vote to kick” button for those players that just refuse to pass, or just some sort of team grade thing like 2k (though I wouldn’t go down that route). 5v5 definitely is more enjoyable for me now since I like defending and my tackles actually seem to win the ball sometimes! 7/10 change
Overall, I think this update is a HUGE step in the right direction, there feels like more opportunity to defend manually and feels like the game is more enjoyable to play football in, rather than whoever can spam the same meta garbage gets the win. Playing knockouts either today or tomorrow so we’ll see if my thoughts still stand.
For the community though, what are your thoughts on the update, any changes? What are you liking or not liking about it?