The FIFA series marches on with its most feature packed, advanced football sim yet.

EA's FIFA series has become synonymous with virtual football, being the only remaining officially licensed game and one that draws huge sales every year. It's a vast and complex game with many game modes, features, and a huge roster of professional football leagues and players. Teams and players are extremely customizable. You can spend just as many hours adjusting every last detail of your virtual teams as you can playing on the field. You can then take them into various career or seasonal modes and let them show their
stuff. I set the CPU difficulty to the easiest setting and it was still quite a match for my novice football skills. The more difficult modes should be plenty enough for expert players.

The amount of game modes and ways to play FIFA can be overwhelming. Thankfully for FIFA initiates like myself, there are an extensive series of skill games, practice matches, and interactive tutorials to familiarize players with FIFA controls and general football strategies. The skill games have leaderboards and should keep even veteran players coming back to improve their virtual soccer abilities.

The AI is particularly smart and unpredictable. Each player on the field works as a team while still expressing their individual quirks and occasional mistakes. You'll almost never feel like you're playing against a static computer opponent that doesn't represent the personalities of the players on the field. Smart computer AI is a rare find in modern gaming, where most of us expect it to be little more than a punching bag. It's gratifying to see that my AI teammates are mostly smart and resourceful and my opponents sometimes make costly mistakes. I've seen the CPU pull off some ridiculous moves and make some unfair ref calls, but I suppose that's part of the sport.

As always, controls and physics have been altered and improved from past FIFA titles. While I'm not a FIFA expert, it's obvious that years of dedicated development have honed FIFA's controls to near perfection. FIFA's dedication to realistic football play has paid off with games that often look and feel like the real thing. Player and ball physics seem spot on and I didn't notice any bugs or glitches. I don't own a Kinect so I was unable to try its features, but the traditional controller is more than adequate.

Like you might expect, FIFA is highly integrated online. Playing in offline mode gets you a very limited selection of modes to choose from. Even though FIFA is a great game, you might want to reconsider if you don't have a constant or reliable online connection. And as always with online games, you're at the mercy of EA to keep their servers running to access most of FIFA 13. Although the AI is pretty good, FIFA has always been about playing against human opponents, and there's no shortage of players online looking for a match.

FIFA 13 is a great video game regardless of whether you follow professional football or not. It has a vast amount of features and customization, great controls, lots of strategy, and a smart AI.

Lots of game modes and features Smart, unpredictable AI Great controls and physics Huge roster of customizable teams and players Occasional freezing issues CPU can pull off seemingly impossible tricks Can be overwhelming to new players Quote: "FIFA 13 is a great video game regardless of whether you follow professional football or not." Reviewed by Matthew Emirzian | 10.31.12 | Platform Reviewed: Xbox 360

Similar Games: FIFA Soccer 11 (8.4) | FIFA Soccer 10 (9.0) | Fifa Street 2012 (7.6) | FIFA 14 (8.9)