FIFA 12

The feature which makes the most notable difference to the on-pitch action is the game's new player impact engine. In the past, when players collided, there was the chance the game's animation would cause them to meld with one another, making them briefly resemble Siamese twins. The impact engine puts paid to that and then some; now when tackled, players tumble over and their momentum and size play huge factors in how they're sent sprawling, and whether or not they wind up injured.

From some hands-on time, however, the jury's still out on whether or not the impact engine could benefit from some fine tuning. If it's an accepted truth that in real-life most football players will tumble to the ground when the player closest to them breathes in their general direction, FIFA 12's impact engine looks like it might act as some sort of long overdue vindication of the spirit of the beautiful game.

Now every second player on the business end of a tackle is sent flying through the air as though they've just trodden on a landmine. A scything sideways slide tackle on an attacker bombing down the left wing in one instance, caused the tackled player to do a 720-degree front flip and land face-first in the turf.

Further exploration of what players could get away with during the hands-on time with the build of the game available illustrated that EA will probably need to tweak the impact engine further before its release. Players were invariably able to hobble members of the opposing team who didn't have the ball with no objections from the the in-game referee, and after a while, body-checking became the new way to tackle. Even if the match regulator is improved enough to compensate for the deviousness of players, there are likely to be some pretty spectacular and hilarious clips of tackles making their way to YouTube in September.

Away from the on-the-pitch action, there's the EA Sports Football Club, a large connected community where players can contribute to the success of the club they support. Players earn XP by competing against other players but their actions also benefit the club they've pledged allegiance to and this is averaged out over all the other players online who support the same team.

"The system means we get an average sense of the skill and dedication of the fans of a particular club," Rutter explains. "That's then compared against all the other clubs and the best teams in the league will be promoted while the bottom teams will be relegated."

"You could end up with a situation where, based on the skill and dedication of the fans of any team, Leicester City fans may get a message saying their club is about to get relegated if they don't get involved. So they then can make the decision to play more FIFA and save Leicester... or not."