Review: UEFA Euro 2008 (360)

For football fans, this is going to be one depressing summer. Not a single home nation has qualified, and worst of all, Steve McClaren has earned himself a spot as a pundit during the tournament, despite knowing about as much about football as Gamestyle's cat. However, we can pretend this all never happened with Euro 2008, or 'Fifa 08 and a half', as it could be known.

These half-way iterations of EA's long-running football series always garner a massive groan from us because none of the ones we've played thus far have been much good. It was like EA shipped them off to be made by the EA Sports B team with the A team working hard on next year's edition. Things seem to be all changing at EA Sports studio at the moment, though. Firstly, we had the excellent Fifa 08, which finally dethroned PES, and now we have this Euro 2008 tie-in, which borrows many elements from Fifa 08 but actually adds a few nice improvements.

A common complaint (though not one shared by us) was that the gameplay in Fifa 08 felt slow and sluggish. This has been addressed. Players will now pass far faster and you'll more often feel like taking players on rather than trying to pass it around them. A few cosmetic changes have also been made. Instead of just being at the bottom of the screen, power bars will now be displayed over your player's head, so too will the player's name for a couple of seconds. If you find them too distracting, you can always turn them off from the game's menu.

The biggest update from Fifa 08 found here is the inclusion of Captain Your Country mode. Here you take control of one player (or create your own custom one) and have to work your way up the national ranks from the B Team to the Euro 2008 competitions. This can be played with up to four players; if, however, you don't have friends, then three of the players will be CPU-controlled and these are our rivals for the captaincy. It's a great system because your performance is graded at the bottom of the screen, so with each goal or perfect pass, your score will go up, but constantly lose possession and it'll reduce. It also brings with it a choice: do you be incredibly greedy and go for goal alone or cross the ball letting your rival score and risk him getting captaincy over you? It's an excellent addition and hopefully it'll make the jump to Fifa 09.

There is also naturally a tournament mode as well as scenarios based on actual cup moments. Of course you can also take the game online. Tournaments and single matches can be played and, while it's still as lag-free online as Fifa 08, the EA servers lately seem to be up and down more times than a tart's knickers.

While the game may seem a perfect recreation of the sport so far, there are unfortunately a couple of bugs which really never should've slipped through the testing process. When substituting players, there can be a graphical glitch where the pitch will flicker; if this carries into the match, you've got a big problem because it produces an invisible player. Seriously, we wish we were joking. When this happened, we thought our Xbox 360 was about to have a stroke and die, but it's a widely common bug and carries on until the ball gets kicked out of play. The second bug is the camera control: during the Captain Your Country mode, the camera is supposed to follow the main action, but can sometimes flash between one end of the pitch and the other in the blink of an eye. It's incredibly disorienting and annoying when it ruins a golden scoring opportunity.

It's because of this that, despite having a number of improvements, we still can't recommend this game over Fifa 08, particularly when you pick up the latter for a cheap price. It's still a competent enough football title, and if they can iron out the bugs, it bodes well for the next edition of Fifa.

Rating: 7 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver