It’s perhaps fair to suggest that when you’re on the 34th edition of your annual sports series, new ideas may start to get thin on the ground.

Every year EA Sports finds itself faced with the same dilemma – how do you take a series that started back in 1993 and has now spent more than three decades evolving under the same Canadian studio, and continue to add new features to it?

Despite this, it still manages to find something every time, and this year the answer is The Grounds. That’s the main addition to EA Sports FC 27, the latest instalment of EA Vancouver’s football game and the fourth since EA cut ties with FIFA and adopted its new FC branding.

In short, The Grounds is EA’s attempt to replace the game’s Clubs mode with something that appeals to a wider range of players. In previous EA FC and FIFA games, Clubs let players form their own teams, controlling a single player in each, for full 22-player, 11v11 matches. It was a great mode, but only really came into its own when you had a full team of friends.

If you have a big squad of chums and still crave those 11v11 matches you’ll still find them in The Grounds, but this time it’s also full of other new match types and other features aimed at smaller groups of co-op players, or even just those flying solo.

It takes place in an open-world town, similar to The City in the NBA 2K series or The Island in WWE 2K. Players create their own avatar then wander around the town, talking to NPCs and taking on their quests, which usually involve playing against others in the various game modes.

This includes a drop-in stadium for those 11v11 matches, as well as a Clubhouse where Clubs can still meet up and play massively multiplayer matches together. But it also includes smaller parks with 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and Rush match types, as well as various mini-games (similar to the training ones in Career mode).

The hope is presumably to offer another thriving new area for players to compete against each other, to split up the grind that is the eternally popular Ultimate Team mode. Naturally, given that I was reviewing the game before release The Grounds was fairly sparse, but just before publishing this review I checked again (now that Early Access is underway) and it’s certainly filling up now.

Given that it’s literally just launched, it’s clear that EA plans to build The Grounds up over time, adding new features and limited time events (because if it can get FOMO in there, you’d better believe it’s going to).

Will it become a new pillar of the series and stand proudly aside Ultimate Team, Career and Kick Off, or will it go the way of The Journey story mode (RIP) or the Volta street football mode, both of which faded away after a couple of games? Only time will tell, but it’s clear that a lot of work has gone into it and while pre-release I could only reliably find enough players for 1v1 and 2v2 games, I certainly did enjoy the change of pace from Ultimate Team.

Speaking of Ultimate Team, EA’s perennial money-spinner gets a few new features this year, one of which – the FUT Gallery – I was excited about, but is a little bit of a let-down. A word of warning to non-FUT players, the next part of this review will get a tad jargon-heavy, so apologies if I start to lose you a bit.

The idea is that as you play through FUT over the course of the year, every player you ever own is stored in a list (even if you sell their card or use it up in a Squad Building Challenge). The Gallery mode consists of a series of Sets, which focus on different themes like specific leagues, clubs, card types or what have you.

One Set could consist entirely of Liverpool players, for example or of Bundesliga players, or Team of the Week players. The twist is that when you complete a set you’re then graded on it, based on the value of each player and other tags (like players from the same nation). The grade can go up to S, and you can earn special rewards based on how high it goes.

For each set you choose the players from a list of the ones you’ve already previously acquired, or simply press a button to let the game automatically pick the best ones from your list. And that’s pretty much it, really.

The result is something that’s oddly both too simplistic and too complicated at the same time. The need to consider relation tags and keep updating sets with improved cards makes the thing more of a faff than it needs to be, but at the same time the fact you can just update each set by hitting Y / Triangle means any actual strategic consideration of which players to choose (like an SBC) is removed entirely.

It’s perhaps unfair to be a little underwhelmed by this, but when Gallery was first revealed I suppose I was picturing a sticker book in my head, where you had to collect every player for every team. This would have meant every time I got a new player that I didn’t previously own, I would have known right away that I’d made progress.

Instead, if you get a low-rated player in a league or team they may not necessarily be better than anyone in your current Sets, and with the game currently not offering any clear indicators when you get a new card which can improve a Set, I can see a lot of repetition in the future where players have to keep going through all their non-S ranked Sets every week or two to see if they’ve bettered their grades.

The grading system in Gallery does at least lead to some welcome changes in other parts of Ultimate Team. The game now adds holographic cards – which are basically fancy versions of certain cards which are worth more in the Gallery – but to avoid complicating things too much EA has ditched ‘rare’ cards.

Whereas before cards could be Bronze, Bronze Rare, Silver, Silver Rare, Gold, Gold Rare and Special, now it’s just Bronze, Silver, Gold and Special. This makes Squad Building Challenges – where you often needed to have a set number of rare cards – less frustrating.

Squad Building Challenges themselves are also improved with the addition of Streamlined SBCs. While the standard challenges are still available, where you have to build a full squad with a certain chemistry or rating, Streamlined challenges simply ask for a specific type of player, and presents you with a list of all your eligible cards. These are then rated in a similar way to the Gallery, and you simply choose enough to add to the required total score.

Single-player EA FC fans rejoice, though, because it’s actually Career mode which has had some of the most notable improvements this time, the most obvious being an entirely revamped transfer procedure.

Now buying a player consists of a number of stages, including the initial enquiry, the response from the selling team, negotiations with the team and the player, and numerous other possible chats depending on how things go. The idea is that because transfers now take longer to secure, it opens up the door for dramatic moments like last-minute renegotiations or other teams trying to hijack the bid.

Club rivalries are now taken into account too, so if you’re managing Celtic and want to buy someone from Rangers – not that you would, they’re a bunch of clowns – you’re likely to be turned down because selling to the enemy is highly unusual.

Obviously, all of this is a waste of time if the actual gameplay is a let-down, and that’s the one area of EA FC that rarely disappoints, no matter what social media will tell you every year. This year it’s another case of evolution over revolution – because these days EA makes changes to FC’s gameplay over the course of each game’s life with free updates, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a huge change from title to title any more.

Still, the addition of curved runs and improved teammate AI mean more chances during attacking play, and the new off-balance dribbling feature – while not a frequently occurring affair – is a cool way to let skilled players cling onto possession by keeping their momentum after being tacked by an opponent. None of it is enough to make you entirely rethink the way the game is played, but “if it ain’t broke” and all that.

The only main game-change is a revamp to the corner kick system. In the past, assuming you weren’t going to take a short corner and wanted to swing a ball into the box, you generally had two options: either use an aiming line and power meter to direct where you want the ball to go, or switch control to a player in the box and run them to where you want the ball.

Each of these options had their own strengths and weaknesses. Using the aiming line means you have no control over your defenders until the ball is hit, and just controlling a defender means the opponent knows the ball’s going wherever they are. FC 27 attempts to fix this by combining both methods in one.

Now when you take a corner into the box, you start with the aiming and line and power meter as before, but once you set the power you then switch to controlling the players in the box, running them around and trying to lose your markers. This adds new strategic elements: with the opponent not fully aware where the ball is going, you can now try to fake going one way then run onto the cross as it comes in.

Being honest, have I been scoring more corners as a result of this? No. But that’s partly because I usually rely on short corners anyway, and partly because it’s only a few days old and players are just starting to figure out strategies.

Personally, I could do without it, because I sometimes like bringing over a player for a short corner then quickly swinging a cross into the box instead, and it feels like the extra time it takes to hit corners removes that element of surprise. Either way, it does feel like over time the number of corners scored will increase, for better or worse.

Which brings us to the one inevitable factor that always undermines EA FC reviews at least a little – community feedback. The FC player base is one of the more… let’s go with ‘vocal’ communities in gaming, and its sheer size means not only are exploits found relatively soon after launch, players also have no qualms in making their displeasure known when they are.

The game I’m currently writing about may feel very different to play a month or two down the line when the gameplay tweaks result in new exploits, which are then patched out with future tweaks. It’s why at this stage focusing on the modes feels more definitive.

When all’s said and done, EA Sports FC 27 easily retains the series’ place as the best football game on the market, a crown it’s been wearing for so long the back of its ears are starting to chafe. The fact that Ultimate Team has seen perhaps its least impactful update in years will be disappointing to fans of the mode, but EA is also conscious that it has those players over a barrel – Ultimate Team is drawing to a close in FC 26, so if you want to keep going you don’t have much choice but to upgrade.

On the plus side, The Grounds has the potential to add a truly worthwhile new mode to the series for the first time in years. It still remains to be seen how EA will evolve it over the course of the game’s 12-month lifespan, but the early signs are positive and make for an entertaining, more chilled out alternative to Ultimate Team’s more serious online multiplayer.

Single players are also catered for with one of the most improved Career modes in a while, meaning regardless of what type of EA FC player you are, there’s at least some reason to make the jump from 26 to 27, even if that jump is more a lengthy hop than a pole vault.

EA Sports FC 27 Review

While most of its existing modes are generally improved without incorporating anything truly mind-blowing, it's the addition of The Grounds that gives EA Sports FC 27 a new flavour that differentiates itself from its predecessors. It's still early days for the mode and it remains to be seen how it'll evolve, but regardless of how it pans out there's still enough entertaining gameplay to be found in all the other modes to ensure that EA FC remains the best football series out there.

- The Grounds brings some much-needed freshness to the game

- Revamped transfer system in Career is great

- Gameplay tweaks add up to a net positive in how it feels to play

- Simplified card rarity and SBCs in Ultimate Team are welcome

- FUT Gallery is a missed opportunity, at least at launch

- New corner kick mechanic isn't a huge improvement