Not bad, I thought as I marvelled at the somewhat accurate presentation. Off to a great start already(!) But then the strains of that horribly irritating Let's Football theme song of the ISL began filtering through. My first home game would be taking place in a generic Brazilian stadium based on Rio's Maracanã.
With the mini tutorial out of the way, it was time to crack on and after picking the strongest (albeit, very narrowly so) team on paper in the ISL, I was off to the Yuva Bharati. It's a mini story that somehow manages to drag David Beckham, an extremely posh couturier ( yep, I also had to look that word up) and Thierry Henry into it and yet, doesn't feel remotely forced - very unlike the manner in which I dragged 'posh' and Beckham into the same sentence. The third reason was to investigate just what on earth this HyperMotion ballyhoo was all about.įirst things first, FIFA 22 probably has one of the most engaging and marvellously executed mini tutorial segments ever seen in sports games. What then would a bunch of teams with a 50-something overall rating be like over the course of a season?
Player likenesses would obviously be photorealistic, they would move the way they do on TV and set the pitch ablaze with their skills. The English Premier League arguably features the best set - if not necessarily best individual teams - of teams in the world and naturally, the game would do its best to illustrate that. The second reason was that because after decades of largely playing almost exclusively as Arsenal Football Club ( because why not?) in football games, I wanted to experience playing as a lower-rated team against lower-rated teams. Shoddy efforts on goal like this were an ever-present part of my first few matches. Just as I simply had to see what it would be like to play as new recruit and WCW legend Goldberg, so too did I need to know what it would be like to play as an ISL team. The first was to satiate my curiosity - the same curiosity that sent me running to the stores back in 2003 to buy WWE Smackdown: Here Comes The Pain for PS2. The truth of the matter is that there were three extremely compelling reasons to throw myself back into a FIFA game. When did you become so enthusiastic about the Hero Indian Super League (ISL), wondered people around me ( including my editor, at one point - true story). Of course, that was until the news filtered in that this edition of the game would be the first to feature Indian domestic football competition - although not the league with the most history, only the one with the most money.
Last year, I opted to play Konami's outing, the awkwardly-named eFootball PES 2021 Season Update instead of FIFA 21 and I'd assumed that I would give both a miss this year. FIFA 17 marked the first time I'd played a FIFA game last decade. While I did play FIFA 17, 18 and 19, that was purely to see what happens to Alex Hunter in The Journey - the series' rather enjoyable story mode set across these three games. This tends to be the case with most sports or sports entertainment games, where all you largely get in year-on-year updates is a lick of paint, a cool new trick or two and an updated roster. So how did we did get here? Let's start at the very beginning.Īs with most franchises that feature an annual iteration, I've tended to skip most FIFA games. In fact, five points separated my team and the sixth-placed Bengaluru FC.
While it is true that at the end of the 20-match-long league stage of the tournament, the ATK Mohun Bagan team expertly well adequately controlled by me finished at the very top of the table, the gap between the top six teams was razor thin. After what my PlayStation 5 reliably informed me had been around five cumulative hours, I'd clawed my way into the semi-finals of the whole shebang.