FIFA Street 3

FIFA Street 3 concentrates the action elements of soccer by drastically shrinking the field and limiting each team to five men. Corner kicks, throw-ins, and carding interruptions are replaced with wall flips, ricochet passes, and some downright unforgiving pavement.

This change of focus yields a more intense arcade feel, where field strategy is supplanted by fancy footwork. More than 250 real players are caricatured into specializations identifiable by body size and floating icon, and control relies as much on context sensitivity as on pushing buttons. Flick the right thumbstick at a defender, and you might nudge the ball between his feet or throw him off with a spin move while your teammates cheer. The more you show off, the more juice flows into a momentum meter that you can spend on satisfying, trippy Gamebreaker scoring sprees.

The defensive half of the game, on the other hand, is a lurching mess that possesses none of the slick appeal of offensive playmaking. Tackles succeed or fail seemingly at random with no regard for where the ball is, and while the left trigger is supposedly devoted to an auto-tackling posture, it fails to respond more than half the time you try to use it. This lack of follow-through is pervasive, too: The solo career mode is a limp batch of 34 challenges, and online multiplayer allows eight participants only if they’re split between just two consoles.

The FIFA Street series has enough interesting ideas to sustain a fully realized sports remix, but after three lackluster entries, it desperately needs to work on its finishing technique.