Bare bones soccer played on city streets, that’s what you’d expect from the Fifa Street series, and that’s what you get here. The third installment in the series, the first on this console run, doesn’t bring much new to the table, or in this case, the alley. This is a disturbing trend with all of the “Street” series of games.

Since the basic gameplay never needs changing it seems easy for these to fall into the trap of simply churning out the same game every time, and that seems to be what happened here. Fifa Street doesn’t mess with the formula, and instead focuses on giving itself the next-gen facelift and making sure that the multiplayer modes remain solid. While this isn’t a bad thing for the groups of soccer hooligans aching to unleash the punishment on each other, it leaves the solo soccer players out there with little in the way of value and entertainment.

The solo mode remains confined to the solo campaign mode, where you take on different teams in various challenges such as a three-minute challenge or a first-to-five game. This gets pretty old rather fast, since there are limited differences between the teams that you can choose from, and all the teams you play are either really bad or really cheap. A lot of the time the competition seems content to pass the ball back and forth amongst themselves rather than make any sort of attempt on your goalie. That is a good thing though, because any shot even in the vicinity of your goal is probably going to go right by him. Your goalie seems loathe to actually stop a shot, especially if your opponent enters into gamebreaker mode, meaning you are royally screwed.

Anyone who has touched a Street game knows what the Gamebreaker is. For the five of you who don’t know, the gamebreaker makes the person you are controlling an absolutely unstoppable athletic machine. In Fifa, this means that any shot they take will be done with extreme accuracy and ridiculous velocity, leaving your hapless goalie scratching his head in confusion, and you screaming in frustration. A refreshing inclusion in this game though, is how getting a gamebreaker doesn’t necessarily mean that you are kissing your lead goodbye. It is extremely easy to deter your opponent who has gained the glowing power by simply stealing the ball away and making sure they don’t get a foot near it until their bar has been drained. Good? Yes. A formula for an insanely long and boring game? Oh yeah.

Because it is so easy to shut down a gamebreaker, you may think that actually scoring a few points for yourself would be easy right? Wrong. Almost every shot you take will ultimately fly somewhere completely outside of the goal. You have to either be right in the goalie’s face or make an insane lob pass and back-flip kick combination to score. This means that just like real soccer, there may not be a score on the board for quite some time, and it was often more than half an hour in my case.

This makes for quite a boring single player experience, especially considering how the in-game audio is pretty forgettable. Yes, the game has the standard Street fare with a mix of popular rock and rap tracks, but they generally fade into the background and are replaced by the wails of the players on the field, which is usually in one of several languages that you won’t understand, unless you are Spanish or Italian of course.

Multiplayer is where this game is truly at, and it knows it. The true joy of this game lies with locking down a few of your friends for a game or two and throwing down. The smack talk that you’ll throw down to each other is going to be the most entertaining part of it though, and you just might be better suited seeking out a copy of Fifa 08 rather than this.

Overall this game doesn’t take any chances and it suffers because of it. This could have been great if more time had been put into rounding off the experience for everyone, and not just those who have a gaggle of soccer loving friends to call over. Hopefully the next iteration of this series will take a few chances, because this definitely needs a makeover.