One thing that worried me all along is that this new F2P model could alienate my dad, since he's more old fashioned and isn't really into modern gaming with its current bussiness models, I was afraid that not having yearly and physical releases like before would make him feel less excited when we tried playing coop like we always do, thankfully I was wrong.
We booted up the game last night on our PS4, which seems like the worst version due to the more limited hardware, and it was one of the most fun football gaming sessions we've ever had, every few minutes something would happen that would make us laugh! The first thing we saw was the UI, I actually like the team selection with the world map, and the kit selection in the dressing room, but besides that it's an eye sore, I don't know where the UI designer for PES2011/PES2012 is nowadays, but Konami need to hire them immediately, the overall UI was not only ugly, which is something we joked about, but it was laggy for some reason, which just left us feeling confused. Before getting to a match we also took a look at the gameplan screen, it's ugly like pretty much all of the UI, it was laggy too which made me not even want to make substitutions, and when we realized there were only 5 tactic settings that were both for attack and defence we laughed again, how could they thing a downgrade like this was reasonable?
Finally, a match, and it was unplayable because I made a severe mistake, I'm not sure if the PS5/XSX/PC versions have this issue, but I decided to go for a daytime match, and we could barely see anything, it was incredibly bright where there was sunlight, and incredibly dark under the shadows, that was very annonying, I'm not sure if it was my TV or my settings, but here's the thing, and it's the same problem I've had with previous PES titles, I don't have to mess around with settings for minutes in order to make things look decent with any of my other PS4 games, just PES, so I'm not sure if it's really my fault there.
Now, gameplay, there were obviously many things that bothered us, like many have already pointed out here, it's very unresponsive, which I'm not totally against, if it's too responsive then it becomes arcade like and fast, it also decreases player individuality, but there's a limit, I think the responsiveness in previous titles was decent, there was no need to make it more sluggish, another thing that was sluggish, and I imagine this is mostly on the PS4 version, but I'm not sure, whenever there were too many players on the screen the whole thing would lag so much, offline, of course me and my dad laughed at this aswell, because it's seriously comical for a game to lag as much as this one even when playing offline, our other football games on PS4 don't do this, so why this one? There were issues with player behavior and awareness too, from both our teammates and the CPU, the turfs look atrocious on PS4, I could go on and on about all of the things that got a chuckle out of us yesterday, like the 5 minute limit, the overall lack of options available for difficulty, weather, even balls, etc... but all of you have already read most of those in the last 30 pages or something, it's bad.
Now, it's not all bad, like I've said the team selection and kit selection menus were nice, I also like the arrow under the player, it reminds me of ISS. Besides all of the superficial things I like, there are also more important things that are good, gameplay related aspects. Even though this game is sluggish and laggy now the actual tempo of the match feels decent, I'm also getting more fouls than in previous titles because there is indeed more physicality than before, even though it's buggy and needs a lot more work. Players also feel like they have real weight to them, and you're punished for sprinting too much since you have less control. Another thing I like is that even with the most assisted passing setting there is a lot more passing error, they just need to increase the pass speed as soon as possible, because it's too slow and feels off, but the error, which depends on context and body positioning, is very welcome. I like the fact that the ball is always in play too, no more black screens to transition, if I have a goal kick the keeper puts the ball in the position and kicks it, it feels more real than before and keeps the action going. However, the addition I like the most, at least in concept, is the new defending system, it reminds me of what they attempted in PES2012, something more focused on the jockey, on timing, more manual, though at the moment it does feel rough and the L2 button messes it all up because it turns your player into a homing missile, it's also more efficient than trying to defend properly, I have no idea why they've added this, either way with time we could have the best defending system in a Konami football game.
Right now I have the same feeling I did when playing the demo of PES2014 all of those years ago, there's a decent game of football somewhere in here, and with time we could have something special, and it does feel that, at least direction wise, they tried to achieve a genuine simulation here, which I appreciate. However we already had a solid core with FOX, all of the new features they want to add to improve the game, like the ones I've mentioned in the previous paragraph, could've been achieved in FOX, so why change it? I believe it's due to Unreal making it easier to scale it up and down, so it can have crossplay between generations and with mobile, which is a terrible reason to scrap so much progress in favor of this.
Still, there's a decent game of football here, and in the following updates we could end up enjoying it, it might takes months, or over a year, but as of today all we have is a game that's unfinished, buggy and unpolished, it needed a lot more time in the oven and releasing it at this stage was a terrible decision which might've doomed it for good, it'll be hard to recover from this because people won't simply forget this release. I mean, lowest rated game ever on Steam, that's not easy to recover from, I'm not sure if eFootball will be able to survive this terrible start in the long run, at least not on consoles, and honestly Konami deserve this, all of it, we were told lies for so long, such poor marketing, no transparency, so many cut corners... the people in charge which took all of the poor decisions until now deserve to have this game bomb, and I'm glad they've changed the name, it doesn't deserve to be called PES, this launch was a disgrace.
+
shot feint. Instead of 
while 
![[-Slayer-]](https://evowebcdn.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/avatars/m/74/74666.jpg?1531356408){kind=avatar}
