When FIFA and EA split up in 2022 after a partnership lasting three decades, FIFA president Gianni Infantino said its replacement series would “always be the best e-game for any girl or boy”. If this first attempt is anything to go by, it’s likely to turn them to e-cigarettes instead.
To be completely fair to Delphi Interactive – a little-known California-based company which claims to be “the architects behind 007 First Light” but appears to have arranged the licensing for IO Interactive, rather than any actual game development – licensed video games based on real-world events can be a difficult thing to successfully pull off in a timely manner.
Indeed, it was another Bond game – Rare’s GoldenEye 007 – that proved some of the best licensed games are those given extra time to cook (it was released nearly two years after the film hit cinemas). When the licence in question is a sporting event that’ll be gone in a month, that luxury is no longer an option.
And so, here we have FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition, a Netflix-exclusive game that appears to have been toe-blasted through its development schedule like a Roberto Carlos free-kick, but as a result has sadly missed its target like a Diana Ross penalty.
Created in collaboration with Refactor Games – which I suspect did most of the actual development, given its crew of former EA Sports and 2K devs, and Delphi’s focus on licensing – FIFA World Cup is the official game of the tournament that will continue to take over your television until the final arrives on July 19.
As well as a standard Kick-Off mode, there’s a Tournament mode – where you obviously choose from one of the 48 qualified teams and play through the real group stages in the 2026 World Cup tournament – and a Penalty Shootout mode. That’s all at this stage.
I say “at this stage” because it appears Netflix has long-term plans for this game. As the ‘Launch Edition’ title suggests, Delphi and Refactor don’t consider this the finished product, something that should also be taken into consideration.
You can only judge what’s put in front of you, however, and at this stage, it’s slim pickings. As with many other Netflix-exclusive games, FIFA World Cup is streamed on your TV or PC through the cloud. Players use the Netflix Controller app on their phone to scan a QR code, which connects them to the game, and they then use the phone to play. Gamepads aren’t supported here.
In practice, this means the tried-and-tested virtual stick control method, where the left side of your phone screen serves as a makeshift left stick, and the right side handles your action buttons. In this case, the right side is just a large square which you can use to perform various commands – tap it to pass, hold it to sprint, draw a line to cross or shoot, and draw a line with your finger held down at the end for a through ball.
The problem doesn’t really lie with the controls, which are responsive enough given that this is being streamed. It’s that the underlying game itself doesn’t really execute the commands in an acceptable way – it’s always either far too easy or frustratingly unreliable.
“The goalkeepers in this game, far from the finest the world has to offer, act like dads who were plucked out of the crowd at a school fair and have been asked to save shots from children for £1 a go.”
Through balls are unusually successful, meaning you’ll rely on them a lot. Crossing is easy enough, but players often ignore your request to take a shot unless they let it bounce a couple of times, by which point they’re well out of position. Shooting leans more towards Princess Leia than Stormtroopers – as long as you’re at least 30 yards from the goal, you can be confident it’ll hit the target.
It’ll likely go in, too. The goalkeepers in this game, far from the finest the world has to offer, act like dads who were plucked out of the crowd at a school fair and have been asked to save shots from children for £1 a go. Hit the target from any range, and you’ll score with more regularity than a problematic influencer.
If you’re thinking “that’s fine, I’ll just increase the difficulty level,” then good luck with that, because there isn’t one. Once you’re at the stage where you’re playing as Scotland and beating Spain (as seen in my gameplay video above, which was literally the third game I played), there isn’t really anywhere to go from there.
It’s rough visually, too. The video game community is often guilty of hyperbole, happily claiming that any game that doesn’t look like Forza Horizon 6 “looks like a PS2 game”. Bearing in mind I don’t usually join in with such inaccurate statements, this really does look like it would fit into a line-up of PS3 / Xbox 360 football games, and not one of the better-looking ones.
Player likenesses – at least the players who have likenesses – are fine. Lawrence Shankland’s forehead is suitably large, and most of the top-tier players are identifiable, even if their character models are very basic. The official licence also means all the kits are accurate (albeit low-res), as are the venues.
Adding to the retro feel is the commentary, which would genuinely feel right at home in the PS1 era. Performed by Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend, who both used to be in EA‘s FIFA games back in the day (so there’s no excuse), player names are mispronounced – the aforementioned Shankland’s name is declared as if he’s a theme park to rival Disneyland – and separately recorded country names are awkwardly shoehorned into stock sentences, often with a completely different tone (“SCOTLAND… made the result look convincing”).
“It’s rough visually, too… This really does look like it would fit into a line-up of PS3 / Xbox 360 football games, and not one of the better-looking ones.”
The most egregious moments are where Tyldesley goes on an (often lengthy) monologue about one of the countries, during which his commentary for all the other events taking place on the pitch are stacked in a queue until he’s done. During one particularly wordy lecture on the history of Haiti’s political crisis, I scored a goal. The Haiti information continued past kick-off, and only once Tyldesley was done did he shout his reaction to the goal that happened 45 seconds ago.
At least one element of the game is a success, but it’s unfortunately the least essential one. The menu music is packed with great licensed tracks from the likes of Calvin Harris, MGMT, and Muse. Perhaps awkwardly, it does also include Song 2 by Blur and Rockefeller Skank by Fatboy Slim – these were the theme songs to FIFA 98 and FIFA 99, respectively, both of which I played recently and remain genuinely more entertaining than this.
In that sense, it’s disappointing to see where the FIFA World Cup series has gone. Many a veteran player will remember EA’s glorious World Cup France 98 game on PS1, N64, and Saturn – the one with the Chumbawamba intro – where players could unlock 15 classic World Cup matches with the real teams. EA also released standalone World Cup games for the 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014 tournaments, as well as World Cup DLC for FIFA 18 and FIFA 23.
To be in a situation where that France ’98 game – released 28 years ago, the last time Scotland was in the World Cup – had more features than this one is a sad indictment on how much potential has been squandered here.
There’s at least some attempt to add a reason to keep playing the game beyond winning the World Cup in Tournament mode. Each win earns you coins, which can be spent on players to level up their stats, up to three times for each player. A suite of basic daily challenges (play a Kick Off match, take three shots, etc.) earns you more coins, too, but given how easy the game already is, making your players even more powerful seems counterintuitive.
It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for the developers involved in a game that was only announced six months ago, and had to essentially be rushed from scratch for a non-negotiable mid-June release. In its press statement announcing the game’s release date, Netflix itself said that it “represents our ‘Kickoff’ – a streamlined, high-energy game that will evolve over time but gives the immediate rush of playing along during this historic World Cup event.”
There’s something to be salvaged here, then. In the same way that Konami turned eFootball around from its disastrous launch (which, to be clear, was still much better than this) to what’s currently a respectable free-to-play alternative to EA Sports FC, there’s every chance that when the World Cup ends, this engine will continue to see improvements for the general FIFA game that will presumably follow.
As it stands right now, however, as the official video game companion to the biggest sporting tournament in the world, FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition is a woefully undercooked effort that really doesn’t do the real thing justice.
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