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UEFA EURO 2008 (PS3/XBOX 360)
By: Adam Waddilove With no England squad in the real tournament, how will this appeal to fans of the series from the UK? Time to give it a kick and find out UEFA Euro 2008 features stunning visual representations of the world's best players, playing in a more accessible, faster-paced and responsive version of the market-leading EA Sports football engine, and all of the teams and official stadiums that will be part of UEFA Euro 2008. Take on the challenge of leading one of over 50 European national teams to glory as UEFA Euro 2008 recreates all of the drama and excitement of the official tournament in Austria and Switzerland. Play as your favourite country from qualification right through to a virtual reproduction of the championship tournament. A new game mode called 'Captain Your Country' enables gamers to customise them on the pitch and wear the shirt of their national team. Work through eight status levels to earn the captaincy of your team and then lead your country into battle for championship glory against your rivals. Go online in 'Battle of the Nations' to earn status points for yourself and your country in a competition for global supremacy. Go for the biggest upsets to earn the most points and then watch you and your country move up the leader boards. Face the challenge and pressure of competing in the championship rounds in the 'Euro Online Knockout Draw' to test your skills against the world's best. UEFA Euro 2008 captures the look and feel of the journey from qualification to the finals with rain and mud dynamics that impact playing conditions, real-time player ratings that change based on player performance, and a penalty kick mode that re-creates the elation and agony of a penalty shoot-out as if you were on the pitch. Experience the thrill of scoring the goal that sends your country through to the next round and then choose how to celebrate it with all-new interactive user-controlled celebrations. Captain your country, play alongside your heroes, and inspire them to championship glory in the official videogame of UEFA Euro 2008. When England lost their last possible chance of qualifying for Euro 2008, we all felt terrible here in the UK. I personally dreaded all the promotions of it and of course the fact that it will be on TV despite us not being in it. However, it seems that EA thought ahead of that eventuality and made it so you can select them anyway, so even though England isn’t in the real tournament, you can play as them through the virtual one. Even other teams who have never qualified for the Euro tournament can be chosen, teams like Ukraine. If you manage to qualify with one of these, you actually get an achievement in the Xbox 360 version just for rewriting history. The most surprising thing about Euro 2008 is the amount of new features and improvements to the overall series. Sure it looks and handles just like any other FIFA title but it’s so much better than any past game. One of my favorite modes is Be A Pro where you only select ONE player to be and you work with an AI squad in matches. In the “Captain Your Country” mode you can do this also, but if you get the captaincy then you give orders for players to pass you the ball.etc, letting you plan your own strategies and results in a different feel of the game. The odd thing about it is that when you are in a Be A Pro mode, the AI for your team is superb. But when you play a standard match, the AI takes a dive and are not nearly as smart. At least that’s how I saw it...That aside, it’s still probably the best in the series. There’s also a nice competitive feature in which you represent a country, gain points and get high on a leaderboard. Everything you do in the game contributes towards your country’s score, even if you don’t play as that team. So you can support England but play as Italy and kick some ass on that leaderboard by winning tournaments, getting captaincy and so on. It’s a nice touch and I can see it being quite popular, even if it is just to keep the French at bay. It’s also definitely the best looking football game I’ve come across. Pitches actually look rough now, not just perfect turf as I have seen over the years. It actually looks fairly realistic, although character models still leave a lot to be desired, especially that of the managers…who look somewhat creepy for some reason. But everything else from the rain to the crowd have all taken a large visual leap. It also runs very smoothly and once again, there’s no separating the Xbox 360/PS3 versions in terms of performance here.    360 owners however might be a little annoyed at some of the achievements that make you replay a long game mode several times for different things, it can be time-consuming and quite annoying. One of the hardest achievements seems to be to score from a free-kick in Captain Your Country mode, not just because its difficult to pull off, but because its also incredibly difficult to actually get a free-kick. There’s also a similar achievement for a penalty which took me a considerable amount of time to actually get. All these things aside, it’s a solid package with a lot to do on either version. I have to say, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I have what with I said at the start of the review, but it’s actually a damn good game and I’ll be playing it for quite some time, even if it’ll go on the backburner for a few weeks for obvious upcoming reasons. The Verdict GTA IV may be just around the corner and will consume us all, but for those sports fans out there…you can’t go far wrong with UEFA EURO 2008. It has improvements both visually and in terms of gameplay, it includes a new mode that totally turns past games on its head, who’d think that giving you one character to control instead of a whole squad would be more fun? It’s weird because I’ve thought of that idea for years and maybe I wrote it somewhere in a past review, so maybe my idea got nicked! If that’s the case, I want a large sum of money please! Ok joking aside, it’s hard to find much wrong with Euro 2008. It has a ton of replay value, looks and handles great. What more would you want from a football title? Time will tell if it can retain the new crown it now has, but it’s certainly going to be interesting to see what the competition will try after this. 
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