Welcome to the truly international sport of soccer as seen through the hardware of the PlayStation2 and FIFA Soccer World Championship. Detailed polygonal characters are designed with the faces of real soccer stars that can charge, pass, and score in smooth high-resolution animation. Select among European, North and South American, and Asian leagues, as well as World Cup national teams. FIFA Soccer World Championship enhances the traditional replay and multiangle camera functionality found in most soccer games. For example, this game allows you to rotate the ball-following camera around a 360-degree field.
Regardless of whether or not you're a soccer fan, there's plenty to love in FIFA 2001, a must-have sports title for the PlayStation2. In typical EA Sports fashion, this officially licensed product features a large selection of playable teams--more than 300 in fact, from 17 leagues and 58 countries--with gameplay presented in a TV-style format and voice commentary by professional sportscasters. In addition to three game modes (exhibition, season, and tournament), you can customize players, teams, leagues, and playoffs, giving this game some serious replay value.
A real beauty both to watch and to play, FIFA 2001 features some of the most highly detailed, smoothly animated player graphics around, and intuitive controls that are exceptionally easy to learn for a sports genre video game. The controls make this a great two-player pickup game, and even more can play provided you hook some controllers up to the separately sold Multitap accessory.
Gameplay favors arcade fun over the sober realism of some sports simulations, meaning there are bicycle-kick shots aplenty, and you can view instant replays using a 360-degree "free cam" to get a Hollywood-budget second look.
While FIFA 2001 is not without its flaws (poorly drawn spectators and untextured turf), and certainly has room for improvement ("barely there" training mode) and additions (what, no women's teams?), these gripes are relatively minor and easily overlooked in light of the major fun to be had. --Joe Hon
Pros:
Great fun for both soccer enthusiasts and nonfans alike
Easy-to-learn, intuitive controls
Highly detailed, smoothly animated player graphics
Ability to customize players, teams, leagues, and playoffs Cons:No women's teams

FIFA Soccer World Championship is EA Sports' first PlayStation 2 release in Japan. The game should feel very familiar to those who have played the World Cup series on the PC or the FIFA Soccer series on the PlayStation. You can select teams from the Italian, Spanish, English, and German Soccer Leagues, as well as U-23 International teams, and, of course, the World Cup International teams. You can also choose to play an exhibition game against teams from different leagues - such as Italy's World Cup International team vs. AC Milan from the Italian League. The training mode is still intact, allowing novices to practice their basic skills, corner kicks, and PKs.
The most obvious improvement is in the graphics, which are now much more realistic - the player models are made up of more polygons than have ever been seen in a soccer game. Although there is noticeable slowdown at certain moments during gameplay (especially when there are fast passes or shots), the game runs at a much smoother frame rate than the PC or PlayStation FIFAs. As in most next-generation sports games, the player models in FIFA have digital versions of the actual players' faces. Some of the faces are amazingly realistic - the Japanese professional soccer player Hidetoshi Nakata, for example, is quite noticeable. Still, there are elements such as the stadium crowd, which is actually in pixelated 2D graphics, that look quite ugly and keep the graphics from holding up to those of other PlayStation 2 games.
The replay function of the game sometimes has such a bad camera angle that you can't even see who shot the ball or into what part of the goal it went. Despite that, the replay mode - which you can access when the game is paused - makes for a nice recovery. Aside from the basic replay functions such as rewind, fast-forward, zoom in, and zoom out, now you can also rotate the camera angle 360-degrees with the soccer ball as the rotating point. This may not sound like it's a big deal, but when you've learned a few tricks with this rotate function, you can actually see replays that are similar in style to scenes in the film The Matrix. It's too bad there isn't a save function so you can record your best goals. The game also features the music of Jamiroquai - but you only get to listen to it when the game is paused, on the menu screen, or in the intro CG sequence. The live commentary doesn't feel as though it's been enhanced over FIFA 2000, which is disappointing.
FIFA Soccer World Championship is probably the best console version of the series so far, but keep in mind that it has only improved graphically. It's pretty much just an updated version of last year's model and plays essentially the same as the previous games in the series. If you are a newcomer to the FIFA soccer series, then you won't be disappointed. If you've followed it for a while though, the game will likely leave you expecting a bit more.--Ike Sato--Copyright © 2000 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review