FIFA 14

By 2013 the PlayStation 2 had been out of production in most territories for two years, yet a boxed copy of FIFA 14 still turned up on shelves in Europe and Brazil. That is the real story here. EA kept the PS2 line alive long past the point of technical relevance because there were still millions of working consoles in markets where a new machine was out of reach, and football was worth paying for. The result is a strange artefact: a game with the current season's squads bolted onto an engine that had barely moved since the end of the previous decade.

What you get on the field is the PS2 FIFA that solidified around 2009 and then stopped evolving. Players turn on a wider arc than the modern versions, first touches are forgiving, and the game rewards a patient build through midfield with through balls into the channels far more than it rewards trickery. Shooting is generous from the edge of the box. Defending is largely a matter of holding pressure and jockeying, because the contextual tackling and physical jostling that defined the seventh-generation games simply are not modelled here. It is a cleaner, faster, more arcade-leaning kind of football than the box art suggests, and taken on those terms it is genuinely good fun with a second controller.

The modes are the familiar spread of the era: friendlies, cups, leagues and a career structure that handles transfers and squad management without the depth the concurrent PS3 version had. Commentary and menu presentation are recycled, with the sort of small inconsistencies that come from a build being updated rather than rebuilt. Anyone expecting the new engine and its collision system that EA was marketing that autumn was buying the wrong disc, and the packaging did little to make that clear.

Judged as football, this holds up better than its production circumstances imply, precisely because the late-2000s PS2 engine was a finished, well-balanced thing rather than a work in progress. Judged as a 2013 release it is a roster patch sold at full price. Both readings are true at once, which is what makes it interesting to revisit.

There is something fitting about a football game being among the final titles pressed for a console. Football is the one subject that never stops needing a new edition, and the PS2 kept answering the call years after everyone else had moved on.