EA’s footie games have always been outshone by the Pro Evolution Soccer series in review scores and with football game lovers, but in the last year that fact started to change. A poor outing by PES and a decent showing for FIFA last year began to change gamer’s minds. One of the first neat features of Euro ’08 is the ability to captain your country. When the game first starts up you’ll have to choose a country to represent, once chosen everything you do in the game will be put towards your country’s total. So if you win Euro ’08 (with any team) all those points gathered while playing will be put towards whichever country you selected at the start and added to an overall total competing against all the other nations. Logically enough you get awarded more points for being a lower ranked side and beating the giants of European football. At the end of the real life competition whichever nation is top of the leaderboard will be the champions of Europe, so if your county got knocked out or didn’t qualify then at least you could get your nation ‘some’ glory.

Captain Your Country plays in the same sort of way but is a more in-depth game. You and 3 friends can all play through the qualifying, friendlies and Euro 2008 finals whilst competing for the captaincy. You create a player, change how he looks, what his stronger foot is, choose a commentary name then take him through the B internationals to captain… if you’re good enough. After playing the matches you gain XP (experience points) that can be spent on upgrading all sorts of your player’s stats like shooting, dribbling, heading and tackling. It’s definitely the game mode that captured my attention the most. Finally you have Euro 2008, you can play the whole thing from qualifying to finals, or go straight to the finals. Of course online is supported with 1v1s or 2v2s. Leagues and tournaments are also supported and are set up and ready to join. The online play is very good, no noticeable lag problems. It certainly seems to play better than the 360 version online, we had several laggy experiences with that.

Now I think this game is really mixed visually. While the stadiums architecturally look excellent, the lack of colour makes them look drab, Wembley, for example, looks like it’s all painted the same shade of grey all over. From the angle you play at the game looks great (apart from some players’ heads look too small for their body), excellent animation makes the game look realistic but I find it gets a bit grim up close. The numbers on the back of the shirts look way too small, every shirt texture looks like its made out of a sack and they all have the exact same creases on. The players’ faces are a bit dodgy too, while you can tell who everyone is they just don’t look as perfect as they should. Wayne Rooney looks more like Dean Windass!

Overall the EA football games are showing definite signs of improvement; Euro 2008 builds upon FIFA 08 adding nice little tweaks and plays a great game of football. The commentary and controllable celebrations are definite plusses. But a build up of minor niggles keeps this game from being a nine.