FIFA Heroes hands-on preview – an arcade style rival for EA Sports FC

FIFA Heroes – very different from the old FIFA (Enver Studio/FIFA)

The first FIFA branded video game since 2022 is nothing like the old EA games, with a free-to-play, arcade style football game for consoles and mobile.

The impending football World Cup – due to kick off on 11 June – could do with some good news. After being saddled with the most expensive ticket prices of any such tournament, the world has been plunged into travel chaos, where travelling to the US suddenly doesn’t seem like such a welcome prospect.

And after EA dropped the FIFA licence in 2022, and rebranded its all-conquering football game as EA Sports FC, many presumed this year’s effort would be the first World Cup since 1994 that wouldn’t be supported by a FIFA branded game.

However, that will not be the case. From April 28, the world will be able to play FIFA Heroes– initially on iOS and Android, and shortly followed by Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

FIFA Heroes is poles apart from the FIFA games that we became accustomed to from EA, as while it will be released for consoles and PC, it’s very much a mobile-led game. It takes arcade style cues from not just the likes of FIFA Street and Super Mario Strikers but even MOBAs like League Of Legends, including a live service element.

We had two opportunities to play FIFA Heroes, the first a brief one in December last year and the second more extensively on a variety of World Cup 2026-branded Motorola handsets. This included the new Razr Fold, which folds out into tablet-like proportions and whose large screen definitely enhanced the experience of playing the game.

The version of FIFA Heroes we played only had one mode: 5-a-side two-player, in which we controlled a team against either human or AI-controlled opposition in rounds of five minute games. FIFA Heroes is definitely one of those games which is easy to pick up, yet contains enough nuance to be tricky to master.

In its base mobile phone state, the game uses virtual on-screen joysticks, with movement to the left and three virtual buttons to the right; you can also flick in any direction with your left had, in order to play passes with more accuracy. The buttons are context sensitive, according to whether you’re attacking or defending; in the former, you can pass, play through balls, trigger skill moves or – assuming it isn’t on a cooldown – launch a special move. When defending, you can switch players, jump into tackles or trigger defensive special moves.

Each of your five players has a different special move that makes sense according to where they play, so the striker has a power shot that can be charged before being unleashed, while your central midfielder might, for example, be able to erect a temporary magnetic shield which repels opposition players trying to make tackles.

It’s all fast yet precise (as in FIFA Street, you can bounce passes off the pitch’s sidelines; cutely, those pitches are split in half horizontally, so you might go from an urban setting to a desert one), very bright, cheerful, and cartoonish in terms of graphics. Which is what you would expect from a football game whose player roster includes mascots, top current players, old footballing icons, mega influencers and even iconic fictional characters like Darth Vader.

It’s as breezy to play as its sounds, yet the more time you spend with it, the more hidden depths it reveals. However, we found the virtual controls something of a hindrance and yearned to play it on a console or the PC, using a proper gamepad, although at least the Razr Fold’s greater screen real estate made it easier to hit the correct virtual buttons.

The game can play fairly seriously at times (Enver Studio/FIFA)

Game director Andy Tudor, a Brit whose games industry CV includes long stints at Sony’s London Studios and EA, shed more light on different modes which will be in the final game: ‘We are adding squad play to the game; so me, you, and three others can each pick a player on the pitch, be locked to that player and therefore play a game where we are in very specific positions which is ripe, therefore, for top-level esports play. It replicates EA Sports FC’s Pro Clubs, which is probably the biggest game mode that this demographic of Gen Z and Gen Alpha play in FC right now.

‘We’ve got private games, so streamers can say: ‘Right, I’m on-stream for two hours: come and get me,’ and can bring players into their games straight away. We’ve got a 1v1 mode, which is very popular in real-life right now, which has additional functionality for the players to allow you to do quick movements away from players, and also to do very defensive moves to stop them from beating you – it’s like half-court basketball. The camera angle for that is actually behind the players. And there are small game modes, like shootouts and keepy uppies, and then we’ve got a major game mode that we’re not allowed to reveal just yet.’

Tudor adds that FIFA Heroes’ gameplay also incorporates cues from MOBA games like League Of Legends: ‘It almost spreads into the MOBA genre, where you’ve got visibility of the rest of the pitch, just like your lanes would be in League Of Legends, and you’ve got cooldown abilities, just like you would have there. The skill moves that you can do are almost like juking in Madden. So knowing when to activate all of that stuff, your team composition, and your positional awareness… all that comes from football but also, yes, from MOBAs.’

Someone brought a photon cannon (Enver Studio/FIFA)

Developer Enver has taken the decision to make FIFA Heroes free-to-play, which should allow it to find a large player-base very quickly. But that, of course, means it will feature microtransactions, including a monthly season pass. Tudor is adamant that, especially given the Gen Z/Alpha target demographic, those microtransactions will be handled as responsibly as possible.

‘As a parent myself, with a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old, they don’t have credit cards. However, I am more than happy for them to come to me every month and go: ‘Dad, I love this game, and Ronaldo is in the game this month: can I have him?’ And I will pay a small amount of money for the season pass, and I know it will happen again next month and that’s absolutely fine, because he’s having a whale of a time, and anything else beyond that, he can purchase with in-game currency. That’s the responsible way as a parent to do this.’

With its high accessibility, arcade styling, and unashamed targeting of a younger demographic, FIFA Heroes makes a lot of sense as the first post-EA Sports game to bear the brand of the notoriously money-hungry FIFA. However, it’s a bit of a surprise that it should come from Enver, a relatively young developer headquartered in New York and previously best known for a string of VR games, including MotoX and FormulaX.

The pitch is often not the same for both halves (Enver Studio/FIFA)

Enver CEO Kyle Joyce explains how FIFA Heroes came about: ‘There’s a major market of mainly young kids and Gen Z now, that don’t play FIFA or FIFA style simulation games at all. FIFA wanted something that’s completely new and arcade sports in general hasn’t really had a big moment since the early 2000s, when you had NBA Street and FIFA Street. We feel like they need to be revived.

‘It’s something that everyone wants to do: how can we bring back the nostalgia of arcade sports, but revisit them almost in a Fortnite style, so they are like live ops games? So we pitched that to FIFA and said: ‘Look: we want to build a new IP. We don’t want to just take the licence and build the same game as everyone else; we want to make something super-new, targeted at a different audience, but one that is still global’.’

Joyce adds that FIFA Heroes isn’t just for the young: ‘This game will have a core demographic of Gen Alpha, Gen Z, but we think it’s something that everyone is going to have fun playing. The general thesis is if you’re really good at EA Sports FC and I’m not, we won’t have fun playing against each other. So we want that arcade moment of those power-ups, where anything can happen in the gameplay, but there’s still a skill component to it.’

Early indications from playing a limited version of the game suggest that Enver has achieved its aim of creating something that is fun for anyone to dip into, regardless of skill levels, and which successfully marries FIFA Street’s raw grassroots footballing with Mario Strikers’ satisfying power-ups. And it definitely has the potential to breed a subset of hardcore players who will drill deep into its MOBA-like qualities and take it into the esports realm.

A football World Cup really ought to have an accompanying video game and, in FIFA Heroes, this June’s competition will have something which is fun and accessible, yet has the potential to generate a considerable following among a demographic which isn’t known (outside of the UK) for playing football games.

In marketing terms, it will surely be inescapable in the build-up to the World Cup, especially as Enver says that its players will be able to win World Cup tickets. But from what we’ve seen, it has at least some of the attributes required to apply some much-needed burnishing to FIFA’s heavily tarnished image.

It’s not a game that’s going to appeal to everyone (Enver Studio/FIFA)

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