You’ll really need to buy lots of packs to find players whose chemistry works well enough to make your team perform well. And while some might say that this is part of the challenge of building your team, it actually felt more like a way for the game to pressure you into buying more and more packs. In other words, while the game sells you the dream of building an Ultimate Team, what the mechanics are actually telling you is to have as many players from the same real-life team as possible.
The developers are so aware of the value of Chemistry that one of the most-expensive packs you can buy will give you a complete Barclays Premiership Club to ensure perfect chemistry. What does the Chemistry mechanic mean for your time playing FIFA 16 UT? While the game purports to let you build “your fantasy team," you’ll actually be hunting for players from the same country and/or same team instead. Players still have the more “traditional" attributes like pace, shooting, passing, dribbling, and so on, but unfortunately chemistry is such an overwhelming factor in team performance that it trumps pretty much all else. It also makes players attributes less important than their country of origin, a weird move both in terms of gameplay but also in terms of real-life football where the best teams in the world consist of players from all kinds of countries. Since players will get along better if they are from the same country or from the same real-life team, the game’s variety becomes a boomerang that makes building a strong team harder and more expensive. Yet, in the UT mode, this huge variety of players is your downfall as your team’s performance depends to a great degree on the team’s chemistry, how well each player works with the players around him. The players you’ll have in your team come from the huge list of 10,000 players from over 500 teams, which in any other mode would be music to football-lovers’ ears because most of us like to play as our favorite team and score goals as our favorite players. You start the game with a few bronze (basic) players, and you gradually buy or earn packs to get better, silver players and then gold players (there are also rare and common players, just like a CCG). So, what is the Ultimate Team (UT) mode? UT turns the task of building your football team into a CCG where you have to buy packs of players, staff, club items, and consumables to build (according to the game) your own fantasy team. While FIFA 15 had started the shift from a football game to a menu peruser, in FIFA 16 UT EA has really transformed the franchise into a disappointing mess with no clear direction unless you count milking the football-loving cows.
FIFA 16 UT is easily the disappointment of the year for me, and it’s really sad that EA has turned the best football game on mobile into this shell of a game whose emphasis is either messing around convoluted menus or playing a football game that lacks even those basic features that have been a staple of the FIFA franchise and football games in general for so many years. Still, I actually loaded FIFA 16 UT hoping I would find an interesting CCG (which is what the Ultimate Team really is) on top of what has easily been the best football game on iOS. While I had dabbled a bit in the Ultimate Team mode in FIFA 14, I didn’t really bother much because I simply wanted to play football without messing with menus too much. The last FIFA I played on mobile before FIFA 16 UT was FIFA 14, which was the last one to have various other modes (like Quick Match and Season) in addition to the Ultimate Team mode. Add to this my love for CCGs, and you can understand why I had high hopes for FIFA 16 Ultimate Team (Free) since it looked like it combined all three genres in one shiny package.
So, I love football manager games, and I’ve loved playing football games (or soccer for some of you) like FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer since the days of International Superstar Soccer on the Nintendo 64.