Do you know what a ‘panna’ is? Your reviewer didn’t before picking up this game, proving there’s educational value to be had everywhere. Like nearly everything in FIFA Street, it involves humiliating an opponent by flicking the ball past him in a ludicrous fashion, and 90% of your time in the game will be spent (feebly) attempting to pull off this and all the other flashy moves in order to rack up experience points and, if playing the specific Panna mode, actual game points.

FIFA Street is the little upstart brother of the venerable main FIFA series, focusing on 5-or-less-a-side matches played on concrete, tarmac, gym floors or astroturf. It’s still football and you still, mostly, have to boot the ball into a net, but it’s all about doing this with style. For straight edges like your reviewer here, it’s not enough to just play sensible passing football and defend solidly, you’ve got to score after doing a load of farcical rainbow flicks, sending opponents into a dizzying tumble onto the deck with your trickery.

Once you've chosen your career starting point, you have to work your way up through local and national competitions before taking on the world

As in the main FIFA series, that involves twiddling the right stick around a lot while using various triggers and buttons to modify what your character decides to do. You can stand on the ball, flip it up onto your neck, juggle it before flicking it over the head of the opponent, and so on. There’s a bewildering array of stuff you’ll discover as you play, most of it instantly forgotten once you’re actually being put under pressure in a match, of course.

While playing offline is arguably the core of the game, in terms of where you'll spend the most hours, the multiplayer is, to coin a hideous phrase, 'where it's at' and the AI will never be an adequate substitute for the unpredictability of a human opponent. So, if you’ve got no internet, it might be worth putting those dollarpounds back in that wallet of yours for the time being. If you do, then you’ll be, well, playing online a lot, probably. Although EA didn’t supply one of those codes you need to get online with, so God knows what it’s actually. “Perfectly adequate, on the whole” would be our guess.

When playing by yourself then, you could just do a friendly match, setting up a game on any surface with any teams - well, apart from the ones you have to unlock first, like the legends sides - and just getting stuck in on any available mode, be it 5-a-side or the Panna one. What you’ll probably do, more often than not, is get stuck into the ‘career’ mode, which sees you and some faceless AI chums having a bit of a kickabout and turning this into a fully fledged career in pro-am foot-to-balling.

Before embarking on this career, you need to create a player and the creation utility is relatively limited in comparison to ones in other games, though you can import your bloke from FIFA 12 if you so wish. Me, I created a new freakish buck-toothed monstrosity instead. Anyway, one question we have of the developers at this stage is: why no ladies? It’s fair(ish) enough with licensed teams like in main FIFA, but surely here we could see the girls getting involved too?

Second later, a rugged defender snaps his tricky legs with a crunching challenge

Woman-related quibbling aside, you’ve got your creation and he can level up by playing in matches, scoring goals and, mostly, from performing tricks. However, doing them alone won’t get you much, you’ve got to “beat” someone with them to get maximum XP kudos. So, just juggling the ball will get you, say, 20 XP, but juggling and then flicking the ball over the defender before volleying it in for a goal will get hundreds instead.

Encouraging you to do this without penalising you for not being good at it is fine, as you can win ‘normal’ matches without leaping ten feet in the air with the ball wedged between your buttocks, but in the Panna mode you’re actively penalised for not being able to beat people using the flicks and tricks. “Well, the game’s about them,” you say, and fine, that’s true, but it’s made trickier by the definition of “beating” someone being rather vague. Put a tackle in and watch the AI move to the side and you sometimes see the “Beat!” message flash up, even though he’s not beaten you. Actually tackled someone and then been robbed yourself? You may see it come up again then too. It’s especially annoying when you ‘do’ someone and then don’t get the bonus. Gah!

Another problem with the ‘beat’ system is that if you can get a lead in the Panna mode, you can just plonk both of your players on the goal line and the opposition can never bank enough points to be able to come back. They can get one for scoring, but with the goal being so tiny, it’s almost impossible to avoid shots being blocked. This works especially well against the AI as it’ll just dance about in front you, while you laugh/yawn and stand on the line watching the time tick down to victory.

Obviously you’re not paying money for a game like this in order to just nick a lead then park the bus like that, but you can bet your life people will employ such tactics online in order to win at all costs. Just hope you never have to play such a dastardly individual.

Elsewhere, the main criticism we’d have is that, well, this should really be part of the main FIFA package, not a full priced new release. The lure of cash and ringing tills is strong for EA, after all, but if you cast your minds back, you’ll remember that early versions of FIFA did indeed have five-a-side modes in it. So, we argue, should they still, making this redundant. But why sell one game when you can split a bit off and then sell it too?

There are a reasonable number of different-looking venues, but they're all essentially the same

If this isn’t a problem for you, and you’re one of these people who finds doing keepy uppies endlessly fascinating, this’ll be right up your street (pun intended). But if you took the tricks out, there’d be very little here to keep you interested. It’s essentially a mini-game boosted with a load of relatively cosmetic differences. It’s all about how ‘rad’ you look doing the tricks, proved by the number of videos showing your said skills performed with a flair you’d do well to even contemplate matching in a match situation.

Loving the tricks is all well and good, but is that really worth 30 or more quid, especially if you’ve already got big brother FIFA? It’s a question you’ll have to ask yourself. And there isn’t even any beach soccer in here, disappointingly. Maybe that’s in some DLC, or even a whole new 40 quid release somewhere down the line.

Favourite Game Moment: It is admittedly funky when moves come off and you flip the ball over a defender before rifling it home.

Platform Played: PlayStation 3