The Streets Won’t Forget ballers like Adel Taarabt, Michu and Juan Pablo Angel, but OG FIFA gamers won’t forget the legendary FIFA Street.
Famously inspired by Nike’s classic Secret Tournament ad where the world’s greatest players faced off in small-sided games on a tanker in the middle of the ocean, FIFA Street let you build a 5-a-side team from the likes of Ronaldinho, Zidane, Wayne Rooney and Francesco Totti to take on the world, introducing a generation of football fans to the words “elastico”, “rabona” and “panna”.
FIFA Heroes is looking to revive that spirit in more ways than one and it all started with another Nike advert, this time featuring Neymar, Zlatan and… The Incredible Hulk?
In a bid to emulate the worldwide appeal of Fortnite, Roblox and Supercell games, FIFA Heroes is set to feature not just real players, greats of the game and football mascots from around the globe, but licensed characters from movies, cartoons, other sports and even mythology. If you can wrestle it, they want it in FIFA Heroes. If it’s green and speaks with a Scottish accent, they want it in FIFA Heroes. If it’s popular, full stop, they want it in FIFA Heroes.
Initially, FIFA Heroes includes the three official World Cup 26 mascots, Maple the Moose, Zayu the Jaguar and Clutch the Eagle, as well as other stalwarts like World Cup Willie and Footix the France Football Rooster. But alongside them, you’ve got legally distinct characters who are from mythology and folklore AND NOWHERE ELSE WE PROMISE such as Norse gods Thor and Loki, and Chinese hero Hua Mulan.
If you’re wondering where the ambitions lie in terms of licenses, those should give you a pretty big hint, but we already know current players from top national teams like Eduardo Camavinga, Emi Martinez and Jack Grealish have their likenesses in the latest trailer, plus classic players like Diego Maradona for the older heads.
But all of that is a wrapper for how FIFA Heroes actually plays, which is, thankfully, fast, fluid and full of skills and super moves without being overly complicated. You pick a team of 5 characters with different roles like passer or enforcer, rather than set positions, who all have special abilities from a shared roster of different powers.
These can be offensive powers like the high-impact Meteor Shot or assist-making Through Ball, or defensive like the bulldozing Brute Charge and extremely powerful Magnetizer, which steals the ball even through other characters’ specials.
There are lots of nice little touches which provide a skill gap without introducing anything too technical like charging and bending regular shots and the timing of skill moves to breeze past opponents – just like old FIFA Street. But really its appeal lies in how it creates high-intensity, but still arcadey, PvP gameplay that still feels relatively low-stakes thanks to matches which flash past in just 2 minutes.
By their nature, most football video games are basically long, drawn-out 1v1 matches which lend themselves to both hyper-competitivity and toxicity, as you go back and forth with maximum potential for BM with obnoxious celebrations and sweaty tactics. Instead of stripping that away for a more sober experience, FIFA Heroes stuffs it all in, then makes you touch gloves and walk away almost immediately. How tilted can you get at a bald eagle hitting you with the griddy when it’s all over in literally 30 seconds, anyway?
The elephants in the room, unfortunately, aren’t the Ivory Coast national team, but microtransactions and lootboxes. Previous FIFA games with EA Sports have long been rightly criticised for the infinite grind of monetised player packs which gamers can sink literally thousands into in a bid to stay competitive. This consideration is doubly weighted when FIFA Heroes is so patently geared towards Gens Z and Alpha.
However, in this sense, while the monetisation does resemble Ultimate Team (you open “Lockers” instead of ripping packs of cards), how it plays out in-game is more akin to Fortnite than previous FIFAs.
In EAFC, Kylian Mbappe is a chase card because he’s literally the fastest player in the base game, has a unique body type and the “aura” of custom animations which make his dribbling, running and shooting feel smoother – the same goes for top-tier Icons and promo cards.
But in FIFA Heroes, while there are a wooly set of stats which go up and down marginally with the rarity of a character from Common to Mythical, the emphasis is much more on the special skills of each character, which the development team says will come from a shared pool of common archetypes. Therefore a player like Diego Maradona apparently won’t have some busted unique ability which makes him massively overpowered compared to Zayu the Mexican Jaguar mascot, for example. This is despite the fact you probably had more chance in a 1v1 football match against a vicious jaguar than El Diego at the peak of his powers.
So while there is the potential for infinite spend, you should be able to build a team of characters with meta Skills without having to grind for one specific, ultra-rare player. Or at least that’s what we know so far. It remains to be seen if there is just one Legendary character with the best Skill who just appears in Lockers.
FIFA Heroes is due to arrive on 28th April, 2026, crucially in time for the World Cup, and hits iOS and Android first before coming to Switch, Xbox and PlayStation. Steam is also a possibility, but hasn’t been confirmed for launch. It will feature crossplay between all of the platforms, with cross-progression on “compatible devices”.