14 DAY TRIAL // 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil is the most recent football simulation title from EA Sports, which is built around the tournament that will take place during the summer, and its big draw is the ability to use its mechanics to create scenarios where a gamer’s favorite team wins the vaunted World Cup trophy.
I am from Romania, and my own national team has failed to even qualify for the competition after a string of pretty disastrous results, so, for me, one of the big draws of the new title is the ability to rewrite history and defeat my opponents in order to get to be one of the best 32 sides on the planet.
2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil is great when it comes to variety, because there are more than 200 teams a player can choose from and all of them come with rosters that have been carefully created using the extensive knowledge EA Sports has about real world players.
As I started the qualifying campaign with Romania, the biggest disappointment was to see how wrong the starting eleven was and how many fringe players were given a first team chance.
I quickly remade the lineup to look a little more solid and then started with a couple of friendly matches that allowed me to test various setups and choose how I wanted to shape my team in the long term.
2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil gives gamers a chance to play skill games in the training sessions between matches, which means there’s a chance to improve the most important players in time and make them better able to stand up to the final tournament.
As the actual qualifying matches started, I bumped up the difficulty from Semi to full Pro in order to get a proper challenge, and Estonia, Andorra and Turkey were rather easily defeated by my 4-2-3-1 tactics and my focus on fast passing and long range shots.
The first real-world test was playing against Holland, a team that has a much better set of players available, but a determined defensive effort led to a solid 1-0 win at home.
I lost to Turkey after that, and Holland managed to defeat me at home, but it was rather easy to top the virtual version of the real-world qualifying group, and Romania is now heading to the final tournament in 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil.