Xbox players can also include FUT Legends in their squads

Concept Squads makes it easy to stitch conceptual teams together, filtering players by things like position, nationality and home league and then letting you examine chemistry links to see what works. fIFA 15 Coins Cheap can't play any matches with a concept squad (there seems to be a bug at the moment letting a few people do this - expect it to be fixed), but as you gather funds you can start searching the transfer market for the players you covet, gradually adding them until your dream team is complete.

Don't delete your Futhead and Futwiz bookmarks just yet, though, because there are a few drawbacks. The feature currently lacks the immediacy and at-a-glance qualities of those sites and doesn't give you an insight into the more detailed in-game stats of the players, only the ones on the face of the card, so there's no way to identify, say, the best free-kick takers in the game without searching online or buying and testing players. It's also a single-screen experience, whereas I often want to browse players on my phone or laptop while I play - something you can't even do with the companion apps, which don't let you log in on more than one device at once.

Xbox players can also include FUT Legends in their squads, although if the availability and pricing of these in last year's game was anything to go by, they will remain out of reach for the majority.

Concept Squads is a semi-useful feature, then, but the addition of loan signings is genuinely ace. One of Ultimate Team's perennial issues is that it's a trudge to start with as you play a succession of games with a team full of journeymen before you can buy anyone decent. Loan players give you something fun to play with while you accumulate match earnings - Leo Messi is provided for five matches if you buy the Ultimate Team Edition of FIFA 15, while players with existing EA Sports Football Club experience points can unlock players like Gareth Bale and James Rodriguez from the Football Club Catalogue. Considering that I played hundreds of matches and spent embarrassing amounts of money chasing coins in FIFA 14 and never got within a mile of Messi or Bale, the novelty of having them in my team at all was quite something. (Ronaldo isn't available on loan, sadly.)

There are some good ideas this year, then - and the bot-smashing infrastructure changes probably represent a mountain of expensive work, so respect is due - but overall FIFA 15 Ultimate Team still feels a bit flat. In many ways, it's the best it's ever been and yet somehow I find myself losing interest in it quicker than ever.

Posted by coins15forsale on Sat, 02/21/2015 - 8:29pm