FIFA 09: Ultimate Team Review (PS3)

Upon loading Ultimate Team you will be given your first pack of cards featuring some amateur players. From here you can build your team and play matches in order to earn coins. Earning coins allows you to buy new cards until you are able to build your "Ultimate Team".

Ultimate Team is DLC for Fifa 09 and costs £7.99 from the Playstation Store.

Every budding football fan goes through the period of collecting, trading and buying football stickers. They're just a massive part of most boys childhood, and Fifa 09: Ultimate Team works with that idea. Essentially, you collect cards to build up your "Ultimate Team". Players can be placed in your squad, kits can be worn, managers can be selected, and bonus cards can improve your stats during a match. You play online against opponent teams, earning coins for every match. Coins can then be used to buy new cards which in return can be used in your squad, traded, or placed in your sticker album. It's a cute idea with lots of reason to keep playing.

If you've been playing Fifa 09 since its release last year, you might have just about seen everything the game has to offer. Ultimate Team can be the reason you get back into the game, with tons more to see, do, and play around with. There's even a new set of commentary from ITV's Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend. If you want an excuse to keep playing, then there's no reason to not pick this up.

The more you play, the more cards you buy, and as a result, the better your team becomes the more engrossed you become. You're essentially mixing football management, gameplay skill and luck all in a big pot and the result is a fun experience.

Within our first 5 matches of Ultimate Team we played two rivals who had infinitely more cards, cash and players than us and we got thumped, even though we felt like we were actually playing better. The balancing is a bit unfair against these more experienced sides, your shots will skew wide whereas the opponents will curve in, their players are faster, etc. It's a bit unfair because you can be the better team by miles and still end up losing, simply because the other player has bought more cards.

If you are burned out on Fifa 09 by now, there's no reason you should really come back to Ultimate Team. While the team management and card collecting elements are neat, essentially you are just playing more multiplayer Fifa, and if that doesn't interest you, this package offers nothing really new.