Front and centre in EA Sports FC 24 is its Ultimate Team mode, where you collect players from across the world and assemble a fantasy football squad to take on online challenges. It’s an absolutely mammoth gameplay mode, featuring tournaments, a player economy, and a sweet seasonal “Moments” mechanic where you can play through iconic moments in soccer, themed around particular players or teams. You can have any players on your team regardless of league, gender, or skill, with players gaining bonuses based on their synergy. As you play, you’ll also increase players’ skills and “PlayStyles” which grant them unique RPG-style bonuses.

Like most of Australia, I jumped headfirst onto the soccer bandwagon during the Matildas’ incredible finals season this year, so it was with great delight that I saw that in Moments you can play through Aussie legend Sam Kerr’s rise to stardom. To access this campaign, you need to have her in your starting eleven, as well as at least one more player from the NWSL. While Kerr is temporarily available for free, to complete all of the requirements you’ll need to engage with the Transfer Market and – of course – the microtransactions.

Adding players to your squad can be done via earning in-game currency to spend on the player-driven Transfer Market, or by purchasing lootbox-style packs of player cards. The players you start with aren’t worth anything on the market, meaning you’ll need to engage at least on some level with the microtransaction-driven systems to get the most out of Ultimate Team. Paid content in full-priced games is nothing new, but the implementation of randomised player packs is insidious and lends an unwanted slimy feel to what is an otherwise terrific game mode.

In addition to the flagship Ultimate Team mode, EA Sports FC 24 is chock-full of different ways to play the world’s game. Two separate career modes let you roleplay as a football manager or player respectively, making decisions for your club and playing out different seasons. These modes are entire games in themselves. As a manager, you’re assembling a squad, sorting training regimens, dealing with the press, and juggling player happiness with the club’s success.

You can even skip playing through the matches entirely and focus solely on the strategic side of managing your club. In the RPG-style player career, you’ll try to build up a reputation as a Maverick, Virtuoso, or Heartbeat-driven football star, spending your hard-earned money on items that boost your stats and accruing skill points to unlock perks. You’ll also have access to a Player Agent who gives you advice and guidance on what to strive for next in your career, lending some structure to the open-ended mode.

Easily the most fun to be had in EA Sports FC 24 for a non-soccer fan is in its bombastic and arcade-like Volta Football mode, making a triumphant return. Taking place on small, colourful courts with far fewer players than a regular match, Volta games are fast-paced and frantic. You can opt to play without goalkeepers, with between three and five players a side, or even with walls surrounding the court so the ball never leaves play.

There’s an online single-player mode for Volta that sees you teaming up with other players and levelling up to collect new streetwear for your avatar, complete with an RPG-like skilltree and chargeable superpowers that let you sprint like Sonic or fly through the air temporarily. It’s camp as hell, super accessible, and heaps of fun to play. Volta is also available in Kick Off mode, which leads to delightfully chaotic multiplayer fun.

Unfortunately, while most of EA Sports FC 24 is oozing polish and sheen, there are still some not-insignificant bugs present at release that mar what would otherwise be a pretty schmick package. Placeholder translation text is scattered throughout quite a few of the game’s UI elements, occasionally making it a little confusing to navigate menus or parse statistics.

There are also some awkward moments of lag between when a whistle is blown for a free kick and when gameplay resumes. At a couple of more extreme points, the game froze mid-game in yellow-card-awarding limbo and forced a console reset. While these issues aren’t super frequent, when they do occur they’re serious enough to really detract from the overall experience, particularly when playing with mates.