14 DAY TRIAL // 
The World Cup is the biggest sport-related event in the world and EA Sports could not pass the opportunity to launch content linked to it, especially given how successful the FIFA series has been during the last few years.
The resulting video game is an interesting experience, especially for massive fans of their respective national teams who are looking to write or re-write history, but unfortunately, the superb presentation and accurate details cannot hide the fact that the Ignite engine is not in use and that the mechanics feel a little old and tired.
2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil is not a bad game and it can make a great introduction to the series, but long-term fans would be better served by staying loyal to FIFA 14, especially if they have played it on the Xbox One or on the PlayStation 4.
Story
2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil is a game with a clear, simple and uplifting narrative proposition for the gamer: choose your favorite nation, presumably the one in which you live, and then get through the qualifying process before taking the entire team to South America in order to try to beat the best 32 other outfits from the entire world and get the most important trophy in international football.
The structure of the EA Sports title might be easy to understand, but it opens up a lot of possibilities for gamers to create their own narratives of failure and success, with crowds either chanting in the streets when victory comes or asking for the manager to be fired when they lose.
The most interesting of these is the one that asks players to Captain Your Country, which involves choosing a player and then leading him through matches, improving his skills and his performance in order to get him to wear the special armband, while leading his team to World Cup glory.
Gameplay
2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil plays fast and loose and it seems that the developers are more concerned with the idea of spectacle and high stakes than with the delivery of a carefully balanced experience.
Compared to FIFA 14, the game favors the attacking sides and especially players who are able to deliver bursts of speed and then a well-placed shot on goal.
Long-range efforts seem to be going into the net more than they did before and many matches have a tendency to end with a lot of scored goals, upwards of four.
This makes sense considering that the World Cup is seen as a showcase of the best teams in the world, but in real life, managers tend to be a little more conservative and use solid defensive setups, which is hard to do in 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil.
There have been improvements when it comes to the way defenders deal with lobbed balls and long-range crosses, but it seems that the EA Sports team wants gamers to score a lot, execute as many celebrations as possible and generally experience a great big spectacle than slog through very tactics-heavy matches.
2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil has plenty of variety when it comes to game modes and that’s what makes it more interesting than prior titles in the same series created by EA Sports.
The big problem is that the game never manages to be as solid from a mechanical standpoint as the previous football sim release from EA Sports, which might disappoint long-term fans of the series.
The game feels rubbery and slow at times and the Artificial Intelligence still has old problems, like an inability to deal with aggressive pressing and shyness to shoot in front of the goal.
Winning the World Cup or getting one player from the B-side to the position of captain can be very satisfying in 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil, but I often felt that the game could have been more accurate as a simulation.
Graphics and audio
2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil is only offered on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, which means that it does not use the Ignite engine that EA Sports has invested so much in.
This means that those who experience FIFA 14 in their full glory might be a little disappointed in the graphics quality of the World Cup experience and the way it sometimes delivers players that bear little resemblance to their real-life counterparts and some really weird crowds.
At the same time, the development team has been careful to use all the licensed elements of the real-life World Cup it has access to and to introduce an entirely new set of presentation options that will make players feel like they are part of the big tournament in Brazil.
The audio design has also been updated with a new set of commentary elements and some interesting observations about each nation, but once more, it only takes a few hours spent with 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil to become a little tired, because there’s no way for EA Sports to deliver the variety that real-world commentators do.
Multiplayer
2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil is a fun single-player game, but as always, when it comes to interactive sports, it benefits from the addition of another human and from some living but tough competition.
The fact that national teams are involved makes the entire experience more interesting when there are different birth places, but the game will probably lack the strong long-term appeal that the core FIFA 14 release has enjoyed.
This problem is compounded by the lack of a version of the Ultimate Team mode, which has become one of the most popular parts of FIFA as a series in the last few years.
The Good
- Presentation
- Captain Your Country mode
The Bad
- Limited physics
- Some engine issues
Conclusion
For fans of football as a sport and the World Cup as a competition, the game is an impressive package that manages to replicate the real-world experience in intriguing ways and delivers plenty of content to keep them occupied until the first kick-off takes place in actual Brazil.
The most puzzling decision about 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil was to only launch it on the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony, which EA Sports has explained by talking about commercial concerns and player base numbers.
On the rest of the platforms on which FIFA 14 is offered, the team has promised that it will deliver downloadable content that is associated with the real-life World Cup.
