EA Sports FC 27 hands-on first look – a more beautiful game

EA Sports FC 27 – it’s that time of year again (EA)

This year’s new football game from EA is promising to improve on the flaws of FC 26 and add brand new features, but how much has really changed?

Vancouver – where EA Sports’ FIFA and FC football games have always been made – is a city still basking in the afterglow of the World Cup and remains, at least for now, football-obsessed. Which made the chance to hear from the developers of FC 27, and get useful hands-on with various elements of this year’s new game, feel like an even bigger deal.

The FC 27 development team talked us through every major aspect of the game and we were then able to try it out for ourselves. As ever with an annual franchise, its community of players want to know what’s new and improved in this year’s iteration. So it’s pleasing to report that FC 27 has plenty that is new, and more fundamental improvements than anyone would probably expect.

The headline addition to the franchise is The Grounds, a completely new part of the game. Essentially, The Grounds constitutes a hub area, which players can physically wander around, either solo or with their FC 27-playing mates. It’s been designed to celebrate global grassroots football culture and offers a wide selection of casual, online football-related games in which you participate as an individual in teams of various sizes.

As such, sports game enthusiasts may think it sounds like The City in 2K Games’ recent NBA 2K basketball games. The good news is that it’s similar in principle but not in practice. Whereas The City is intolerably brash and Americanised, The Grounds has three distinct areas, modelled on the urban footballing environments of the UK, Argentina, and France.

Sensibly, The Grounds also provides a new home for Clubs, FC’s existing online social play mode, in which you also control a single player. In effect, it feels as though Clubs has spilled over into the sort of neighbourhoods where cage football is routinely played. The Grounds proved to be a pleasant surprise, in that, unlike The City, exploring it was a pleasure. It was studded with minigames and the general ambience was nicely observed – the music changes between each national area and graffiti and murals celebrated local players and iconic footballing moments.

It was easy to drop into a number of minigames in The Grounds, including short 2v2 and 3v3 games in which we were given objectives such as scoring from a certain area of the pitch, which adds a bonus goal to your tally. A murderball-inspired game sees each player running around with three helium balloons attached. Every time you kick a ball and hit another player, they lose a balloon; amusing power-ups are also on offer, such as tyres that can be thrown to trip opponents.

An area called The Clubhouse provides access to conventional Clubs play. You can upgrade your Grounds character’s skill via enhancers called Amps, which EA announced could be purchased (another avenue of microtransactions), but which can also be earned by completing the area’s various challenges.

Overall, The Grounds exceeded expectations – which admittedly were low following our experiences of The City. But it was a good part of the game just to hang around in and looks set to stay (and grow – it covered a fairly small virtual surface area) in future FC games. You could even envisage it hosting a narrative mode like The Journey in future.

One aspect of FC 26 which was hailed as bold, if not entirely successful, was that game’s willingness to tinker with the fundamentals of gameplay which previously had remained more or less unchanged for many years. FC 27 goes even further in that respect; EA has not just addressed gameplay issues which arose in FC 26 but has revamped fundamental aspects of the on-pitch play which have annoyed FIFA and FC players for years.

After getting hands-on time with Champions League games, using a restricted roster of top teams, we can confirm that EA Sports’ efforts in that regard seem successful. In FC 26 games, for example, defensive interceptions would often cause the ball to ricochet unrealistically back into the path of attackers who, with your defenders out of position, would score easily.

Those weird ricochets had been eliminated in FC 27, and Kantcho Doskov, design director of FC 27’s gameplay team, explained the lengths the developer went to in order to make sure they were banished: ‘We had to completely strip out the existing system for interceptions and build a new one from scratch. And we spent the last six months doing that.’

His line producer, Gilliard Lopes, added: ‘We didn’t see FC 26 as a year to focus on fundamentals – we saw it more as a beginning of an initiative of every year focusing on fundamentals. To the point where we even restructured the gameplay team to have a team that is called the Fundamentals team, which operates year-round.’

Naturally, the graphics have got better too (EA)

One of FC 26’s mantras was to make the game more responsive, and that has definitely carried forward – with greater success, as far as we could tell from the hands-on – into FC 27. One aspect in which that could be seen was in the off-the-ball movement of forward players; EA Sports has pared back animations so that players who pass the ball will run into space instantly, enabling you to pass back to them more easily – albeit with slightly different timing compared to previous versions of the game. Trigger-runs have also been tweaked to be more intelligent and useful.

The crossing system has been revamped so that this time around, you feel much more in control of where your crosses are going. Doskov said: ‘We went back to the drawing board with crossing and said: ‘What are we doing?’ We were picking a receiver, so if the player wasn’t making a good run, the ball in wouldn’t be good. But now we’ve switched that whole concept around. It’s more about whipping in a dangerous ball and putting it into the danger zone, and if somebody is able to connect with that, that’s great.’

A revamp of forward players’ AI means that they stay onside better than they did previously, and the defensive AI has also been dialled down, so that much more is left for you to do in terms of switching players, intercepting, and tackling. Before, AI-controlled defenders would often be drawn to the ball, going out of position and leaving gaping holes, but in FC 27, with the control back in your hands, we found they tended to do so much less.

The free kick and corner-taking systems have also been fundamentally changed so that with corners, for example, once the kick has been triggered you gain more ability to move your forward into the right position. And the very best players will now be able, in the style of Lionel Messi, to dribble while off-balance and stumbling, which is impressive to behold. As in FC 26, you can still choose between two overarching gameplay styles – Competitive and Authentic – and all the changes described apply in Competitive mode; we still can’t really see the point of the more ponderous Authentic style.

FC 27 also sees a major revamp for Career Mode – in which you get to flex your managerial skills – as it makes the tortuous process of buying and selling players more true-to-life. But although it plays into the transfer system to some extent, the headline new feature revamp is dynamic OVRs.

In FC, an OVR is just an abbreviation of any given player’s Overall rating and in previous years OVRs, in Career Mode at least, were set in stone. But in FC 27 they will change according to factors such as fitness, form, and general happiness (for example, players left on the bench will see their OVR drop if they think they should be starting).

The rationale behind Dynamic OVRs is to get you doing more management, as Pete O’Donnell, FC 27’s Career Mode game director, explained: ‘We set it out to basically make every match an interesting decision. That’s from a standpoint of both picking players literally for that match but also thinking about delivering 60 matches across a season. I find myself looking a lot more at the fixtures coming up, thinking I’ve got to rest that guy because I have a fixture against Arsenal or whoever. So it really changes your perception of what your management is.’

As far as transfers are concerned, in FC 27’s Career Mode the process of buying a new player will have more stages, involving aspects like agreeing personal terms with players and agents, as well as pinging offers back and forth to clubs. O’Donnell described the system as ‘Transfers 2.0’ and said that it now takes into account clubs’ acknowledged transfer policies = if you play as Chelsea, for example, your scouts will suggest younger players.

FUT gets a trophy room (EA)

Stats-wise, the new system incorporates data from Transfer Room, a data organisation that works with most modern clubs, and there’s a new stat called xTV, which stands for Expected Transfer Value, and which should help you to generate realistic bids that won’t be instantly dismissed.

The dynamic OVRs should also help you find talented players on the cheap, since a player recovering from an injury will have a low OVR, so if you can snare them and nurture them, you might have a bargain on your hands.

The final addition to Career Mode is new Unexpected Events, which are mad occurrences that throw curveballs at managers. EA Sports has added 25 of those, so there are now 60 of them, and tweaked the existing ones to keep a sense of freshness. Career Mode will also bring in press conferences, in which you’ll have to make decisions that are likely to please one player while annoying another.

O’Donnell said the new transfer system had been designed to be more dynamic and rewarding, and in Career Mode you will certainly have to do a lot more of the sort of stuff that managers do than in FC 26 or its predecessors. But we’ll have to wait until the game is finished to find out whether EA Sports’ efforts on that front meet expectations.

That’s also the case for FUT, FC’s hardcore card-based online mode and the game’s main repository for microtransactions. It’s totally impossible to predict what FUT will be like in FC 27, since it’s a game mode which only really reveals itself fully once the game has been on sale for a considerable period. And FUT players are both notoriously fanatical and hard to please.

The headline addition to FUT in FC 27 will be the addition of a FUT Gallery, a sort of trophy room which will keep track of all the players and sets of players that you have owned, providing a sense of history beyond your favoured starting eleven, and offering a chance for others to see how committed an FUT player you are.

EA Sports will also add single-player FUT events to FC 27, citing the road to the Champions League final as an example, in which you play a series of knockout games against increasingly tricky AI opponents. It also said it has ‘modernised’ the SBC (Squad Building Challenges) system, adding more flexibility to it. Plus, it said it has addressed a problem that appeared in FC 26’s FUT – in which plus-level players upgraded with a number of different play styles led to top level teams finding themselves in stalemates on the pitch – by capping the number of play styles at three.

What we saw of the game so far was hugely impressive, especially in terms of the cleaned up and improved basic gameplay, and the general appeal of The Grounds. Right now, the beautiful game is on everybody’s mind, after the World Cup and with the imminent resumption of the Premier League. And the video game that best represents it looks set to be a significant improvement on last year’s iteration, and possibly even a classic.

Formats: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: EA
Developer: EA Vancouver and EA Romania
Release Date: 25th September 2026
Age Rating: 16

The legacy of FIFA continues (EA)

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