FIFA 18 Review – Football Ultimate Team – FUT

Across all the EA Sports titles, I’ve always been drawn in by one mode, which also happens to be the mode I play almost exclusively. Perhaps it’s the sports card collecting that stirs that nostalgic spoon in my body, buy whatever it may be, the Ultimate Team mode, in my opinion, is EA’s finest! In FIFA18, FUT builds on previous years, providing more things to do daily, and providing free packs and coins like never before!

The Ultimate Team mode is fairly simple: you will complete games to earn coins and other prizes, which you can then redeem for packs of cards. Those packs will contain players, contract cards – because what good is a player without a contract – fitness cards, and temporary player performance boost cards, amongst a number of other items. With these cards, you will construct your team, play more matches, earn more cards…you get the point. Rare players are hard to come by, but if you save your coins up, you can purchase better packs with higher odds of good players. To date, I haven’t had any spectacular pulls, but have some decent players!

To me, FUT appears to be less reliant on grinding this year, providing players with more rewards, more often, even if it isn’t always Gold packs. The issues I’ve had with previous Ultimate Team modes was that you could potentially grind match after match for a few hours without ever securing any type of reward, outside coins accumulation.

That appears to have changed here, with rewards and free items around every corner. No day in FUT is ever a grind; regardless of how many matches I play, I’m always earning and opening rewards.

Daily, Weekly Challenges

Daily and weekly challenges are a great way to score rewards quickly. Depending on your skill level, both sets of challenges could be done in a single day – 5 challenger per category – but those playing leisurely should expect to complete, at least the weekly challenges, within a few days of playing.

Challenges vary from week to week, and day to day. Often you will be tasked with assigning a contract or fitness card to a player, or might be required to score two goals with a person from a specific country. What I found odd was there were no additional bonuses for completing tasks on a higher difficulty, aside from getting more match coins at the end of the game.

Rewards vary from Bronze to Gold quality, and could be a combination of players, consumables, or just plain old coins.

Squads Are Back

Ever wonder what you will do with all those players you no longer need? Back again is the FUT squads, which allows you to complete certain squad requirements to dump your old, unnecessary players for great rewards.

Certain squads will require specific items, such as all players from the the same league, country, or ever at times, the team. Cashing in these squads will get you some fantastic rewards, based on what you’ve cashed in. Obviously, a squad which requires Gold players will net a better reward than squads that require Bronze.

Using the FIFA 18 Companion app will allow you to do some of this while you are away from your console, so we strongly suggest downloading the app to your Apple or Android device and earn those rewards on the go!

Squad Challenges

Squad Challenges will allow players to use their team to compete against teams from other players around the world. Players are given 4 matches to complete – which reset after a set amount of time – and will earn points depending on how they perform in the matches, and what difficulty they play on. The better you do, the more points you will earn, the higher you will climb on the leaderboards. The leaderboards reset each week, with great rewards available for those who climb really high!

Conclusion

This is only one mode amongst a host of others in FIFA 18, but definitely the one I have the most fun playing. We will reserve our final score for FIFA 18 until we get a chance to look at everything,