FIFA 13 on Vita, first user reviews lay into a poor effort

1 WEEK AFTER UPDATE: Wow, having done a whole lot of wondering (below) last week, I thought I'd check and see how FIFA 13 was doing on Metacritic. Except there are still no entries for it, zero, nil, nada! The user score has rocketed up to a corking 3.8, yet the entire games journalism industry has decided to give it a pass. How much is EA paying for this blanket of silence? 37 reviewers have managed to try the Xbox version, 22 have played the PS3 edition, yet not one single games publication has tried the Vita one - WOW!

UPDATE (5 October) - Gamespot has finally put up a review, giving it 5.5, a week too late for those who paid good money for a piddly update.

Hey, I found a review! "There is hardly no innovation here just some tweaks that hardly justify spending out another £40. For instance, there is a new online friends league, the menus load faster and the graphics and player modes seem slightly improved over the previous game. Career mode also seems to have been slightly tweaked and you can now create set pieces within practice mode - that's about all I can find which has changed"

Original article:

Ouch, you may be wondering why there are no PS Vita FIFA reviews out there. This is probably why... of course that's just one guy's opinion (UPDATE: more user reviews, tweets and opinions are backing him up) on Amazon but if the game basically lacks any of the features of the core versions of FIFA 13 then why not give it a different name? As happened with the original Vita version, and was suggested by EA not too long ago.

UPDATE: User scores are starting to appear on Metacritic, giving the game a you've-got-to-dig-for-it 0.4 average, currently. While I doubt this will dissuade EA from doing shitty updates in the future, and the game is clearly worth more than that (give it a five or six at least) it might force them to stop calling games by titles that clearly misrepresent them.

While the first FIFA on the Vita is a fine game, this really does sound like a we-all-saw-it-coming accident that will sour the Vita for fans of the series and give more clout to the "Vita is doomed" bunch. Even then, it will probably sell truck loads (in Vita terms) and dominate the chart until next year's (hopefully proper) update.

Also, where are the proper games press reviews highlighting the terrible lack of updates? And if there are subtle improvements, why hasn't EA been doing anything to promote them?

With EA doing such a poor job of marketing and getting information out, you have to suspect the guy is right. Considering the first game is now £20 cheaper on Amazon, you might want to pick that up if you can live without the latest team sheets and strip designs. It will be fun to see any proper reviews when they appear. I'll add them and other user opinion as they emerge. Check out a video of FIFA 13 in action and play spot the difference.