Imagine that you are watching a Liverpool match at Anfield packed with supporters, singing, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. Except that in FIFA 15, you don’t need to. What FIFA 15 does brilliantly is to create the atmosphere for a power-packed game. Here, players are equipped with emotional intelligence, which means that they react, emotionally, like scoring a last-minute goal or being tackled by the opposition near the goal-scoring area at a crucial moment. This takes your virtual gaming experience to a new high, where you feel a part of the team that you are managing.

If all this adds character to proceedings, it's the goalkeepers who provide the muscle. EA's calling them 'next-gen keepers', which doesn't really mean anything, but they're noticeably better than they ever have been, That doesn't just mean they're harder to beat either - they also make more believable mistakes. It's infinitely more gratifying to score five on-on-ones that see the goalkeeper react in different ways than it is to score the exact same goal five times, even if the end result is the same.



Going hand in hand with goalkeepers is the ball physics, where we have seen some interesting changes. Essentially it is more of the same, but we can’t help shake the feeling that it generally feels more lose. Passing seems to have picked up some pace with the ball moving at high speed on the ground. The team have paid particular attention to the lofted through balls issue which don’t seem to be as effective this season. Shooting seems to be more rewarding this year with semi-automatic controls as you have more control over the overall “looser” nature of the ball physics.

Not that the game is without its flaws. Small graphical issues pop up on the PC version, which is the one I’m playing. With all of the settings maxed, it runs fine on my medium grade rig, but I’m left with slightly jagged lines on my players skin surfaces when the camera zooms in and the metallic surfaces of trophies have a rainbow sheen to them.