These changes are all welcome, then, but - to borrow one of EA Sports' favourite phrases - they are not game-changers. Heading back to the pitch, it also feels as though FIFA 11 has taken a natural step forward in a lot of areas, but has lost a bit of its heart in the process. The gameplay changes sound as though they make for a subtler game where knowledge of your players and mastery of the controls are the ultimate currency, but the reality for some players is that matches are a slog.
FIFA 10 may have had zippy sci-fi passing, moments of madness and goals from the halfway line, but you felt like you knew the rules and quirks and the latter gave it a likeable personality. FIFA 11 is more realistic and less predictable than ever, but it turns out this doesn't make it much more fun - instead it results in more situations where the game's margins of error determine the outcome rather than your instinct and logic, where midfield feels clogged up a lot of the time, and where the many genuine improvements EA has made are lost in frustration.
At its best FIFA 11 is enormous fun and brilliantly engineered, but in its battle to be more varied and realistic it has lost some of its momentum, and off the pitch returns are starting to diminish too. Looking ahead, it will be very interesting to see whether the wholesale changes Konami has made for this year's Pro Evolution Soccer bed down quickly enough to close what seemed like a huge gap just 12 months ago - because, against all odds, this one now looks like it could go to extra time.
