EA SPORTS FC 26

Ask anyone what's wrong with EA's football games and they'll tell you about Ultimate Team — the packs, the points, the pay-to-win economy. I expected to write that review. Then I counted.

Across the hundred most-helpful English negative reviews of FC 26, Ultimate Team is mentioned 14 times. FUT appears four times, packs six, points three. Meanwhile bugs appear 25 times, gameplay 24, lag 20, and money 29 — much of it about the game's price rather than its shop.

The dominant complaint about EA Sports FC 26 on PC isn't that it's greedy. It's that it doesn't work properly.

What the reviews actually describe

The specifics are unusually consistent, and they come from people with hours in. The median playtime across those hundred negative reviews is 122 hours; the highest is 1,930.

A 267-hour reviewer lists it plainly: "120 FPS → 5–10 FPS at halftime, every match. Completely unplayable. Stutters, freezes, bugs everywhere." A 57-hour reviewer describes the same thing in less polite terms — a memory leak pushing GPU usage to 100% and rendering the game unplayable after a single half, still unfixed well into 2026. A 138-hour player explains a smaller but maddening one: graphics settings that never save, so every launch means reconfiguring from scratch. "Take a screenshot when you finally find the perfect settings."

Then the launcher. A 50-hour reviewer's account of "fighting against port 3216, flushing your DNS settings or reinstalling the game just to get it to run" will be familiar to anyone who has dealt with EA's PC client, and it appears often enough to be structural rather than unlucky.

The worst of them is data loss. A 165-hour player reports the game crashing and wiping every Career Mode save and setting. Career Mode comes up in 19 of the hundred negatives, and a 26-hour reviewer makes the point that matters for anyone hoping to dodge the monetisation entirely: "I honestly don't care about Ultimate Team. I only play Career Mode anyway. That's why I thought the game wouldn't be so bad for me. However, the game feels absolutely unfinished."

The World Cup problem

One consumer warning worth isolating, because it's timely and specific. A June 2026 review with 1,324 votes addresses people buying FC 26 for the World Cup: the mode "is not customised, it's basically a normal FIFA overlay," and reviewers report incomplete licensing meaning some national squads aren't accurate and certain players are missing entirely.

Licensing gaps aren't EA's fault in the sense that rights are negotiated, not decreed. Selling a World Cup experience without telling buyers which teams are real is a different matter, and the negative reviews spiked to ten in June 2026 — the tournament month — for exactly this reason.

The annual-release trap

Here's the fact that most affects a purchase decision today, and it's visible on the store page itself.

FC 26's own announcement feed through late July and early August 2026 is almost entirely FC 27: a gameplay deep dive, a Career deep dive, a FUT deep dive, a cover-star reveal, and pre-purchase links for the Ultimate Plus Edition. The publisher has moved on and is using this game's channel to sell its replacement.

That's how annual sports releases work, and there's no scandal in it. But it does mean that buying FC 26 in August 2026 means buying a product whose successor is weeks away and whose remaining support window is closing. The NZ$39.00 price — well down from launch — is the market pricing that in.

What's genuinely good

The football is fine. It looks good, it plays like FC, the licensed content is unmatched and always will be, and there are more modes here for one purchase than most games offer. Reviewers with hundreds of hours are, by definition, getting something out of it.

And I'll credit the thing I expected to attack: for all Ultimate Team's reputation, it is not what this game's critics are angriest about. That's a genuine finding, and it's worth stating because the received wisdom about EA football games is now a decade old and no longer matches what players are actually reporting.

Current sentiment is also better than lifetime — 58 of the last 100 English reviews are positive against 50.7% overall — which suggests some of the technical work has landed even if the loudest complaints haven't gone away.

The verdict

EA Sports FC 26 earns a 5.5. The sport simulation inside it is competent and the licensing is peerless, and if the PC build ran cleanly this would be a straightforward 7 for the people who buy football games every year.

It doesn't run cleanly. Nearly a year after release, players with three-figure hours report memory leaks that break matches at halftime, settings that won't persist, a launcher that fights them, and crashes that have destroyed Career saves. Those are not opinions about game design; they're reports of a product not doing its job, and they're why a Mixed rating on a game this polished isn't the paradox it looks like.

If you want this year's squads, buy it discounted and back up your saves. If you want a football game to actually live in, Football Manager 26 is a very different proposition with its own problems — or wait a few weeks and judge FC 27 on whether EA fixed any of this, rather than on the deep dives.