Konami’s European offices occupy a three-story building a few steps from Windsor Castle and around fifty people work there, most of them working on Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Link, another cross-platform free to play that works great and generates big profits. The sense of eFootball is all here: now very far from the numbers of FIFA, which can still afford to combine a full-price positioning combined with the rich microtransactions of FUT, the Japanese football, what was once PES, must catch up. And after all, the company has long since put aside large AAA productions.
eFootball 2022 is the first cry of a project that will be updated with new seasons and more content. The
September 30th will come a version equipped with
some teams (Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Manchester United, Arsenal, Corinthians, Flamengo, River Plate and Sao Paulo) plus a handful of licensed stadiums, the ability to play against AI or other users, online and offline, and
some weekly events. The rest will come later, with a tight release plan starting in the fall.
The version we tested was roughly the one that will be downloadable at the end of the month, without the online part but with a few more
gameplay functions which will be implemented at a later time. The Japanese developers intend to create a product that starts from some fixed points: staid game pace, more realistic if you want to simplify, fairly articulated controls and a focus on duels. The result for now is in chiaroscuro.
I
new controls they intend to give more variety to the action. For example, interceptions have a heavier weight and in fact I liked the ability to better control the body of your player through the right analog stick while pressing. As well as I appreciate i
Power Kicks: by holding R2 down before taking any kick, be it a pass, a shot or a cross, our alter ego in shorts kicks more vigorously, but being the larger movement it needs more space.
The two characteristics complement each other: to avoid interception or prevent an individual duel, kicking deeper helps, but you have to think about it in time, otherwise perhaps a horizontal or backward discharge is better, and so on.
Moves and counter-moves, which give the idea of actually wanting to create a simulation closer to reality and ultimately ambitious. At the same time there are problems, it is undeniable. Not all
the interactions between the models are perfect, indeed, e
ball physics sometimes works less well than in other cases.
These are both aspects that Konami has already pointed out that they will be improved over time and, in my opinion, here the bulk of the work will be primarily aimed at mastering the Unreal Engine 4 in the best possible way.
artificial intelligence. Playing against the AI it is perceived that the developers want to implement a more modern football, made of construction from below and re-aggression as soon as the ball is lost, but the movements are not always what they should be and the goalkeepers tend to err more than they should when setting (
non solo Szczęsny).
THE FOUNDATIONS FOR THE FUTURE
Football has changed a lot in recent years, the restarts in the open field have often been replaced by a more accentuated compactness between the lines, combined with greater physicality and solutions such as man-made scoring across the field. eFootball seems to have in mind to allow all this, both through
the implementation of new tactics, and thanks to its controls. Only, for now, it doesn’t always work.
Technically there are ups and downs. The game still features details like grass or the aforementioned animations that could certainly be improved and, especially on PS5 where we played the title, are far from making a miracle scream. There are several
animations of imperfect interludes and playing there are bugs, for example a player in the net stopped while he was going to get the ball, forcing me to restart the game.
At the same time the action is fluid thanks to the possibility of never leaving the field even when the ball goes out and the Duel camera, which tightens on duels as needed and then reopens, works quite well. In addition, the usual attention to team partners returns, who can count on stadiums, changing rooms and details made with care in order to better immerse users. There
telecronaca will be entrusted to Caressa and Marchegiani but in the tested version only the English language version was available. On the other hand, the sound is good, which gives you the opportunity to choose at will how to balance commentary, noises of the field, of the stadium and so on.
KICK OFF
On 30 September eFootball 2022 will be downloadable by everyone and
it will, in fact, be a kind of big demo. Will it be worth a try and be patient for a while? The answer I have given myself is yes, for a couple of reasons. The first, very trivial, is that being free there is not much to lose. The second is linked to the paradigm shift chosen for the series: Konami embraces a model that physiologically provides products with problems and not all the contents available immediately, but capable, hopefully, of evolving over time.
All the big hits of this genre, which combine free to play and online competition, started one way and then matured. In perspective, this “live” model should guarantee great flexibility to respond quickly to the needs of the public.
However, there is no doubt that
this direction will not appeal to historical fans, that in order to have something comparable to the “
old PES”, At least in terms of options and methods, they will have to wait. In the autumn, the Creative Teams will arrive, that is, those made by users and not the real club teams, more competitions and the first experiments with in-game currencies. There will be more introductions thereafter, including the Master League.
In between the gameplay will have to evolve, there will be problems and things to fix. Konami has chosen a complicated and ambitious path, it is not certain that it will succeed in having the hoped-for success. But it was perhaps the only one to ensure survival.
Source:
https://www.italy24news.com/sports/news/amp/115685
Next up, while I quite like the level of detail in the closeups and stadium intros, it just fails to carry through to the actual pitch. I played on an LG OLED, so this wasn’t a bad TV, but the pitch, which looks as flat as I feared it would. Even things like slide tackles leaving marks on the grass, which has been a bit of a staple in graphical flourishes, is conspicuous by its absence.
The thing is, the crowd in eFootball just… Well… Looks bad. I appreciate they’re there as a peripheral more than anything else, but when you go to take a corner and you see a bunch of repeated, pixelated character models just moving up and down to get some sense of movement, it really takes you out of things.
It ranges from the minor, with things like player markers being stuck on the pitch during a replay, to the major, with collision bugs appearing in more than a couple of instances. This ranges from weird collisions leading to a foul or a missed call from a referee, to arms full on appearing like jelly when challenges are made. I pushed a couple of games to penalties, and with ever one, the goalkeeper just jittered along the line before the kick was taken. It’s a really weird issue that doesn’t look like it’s going to go away just yet.
However, the most egregious issue with the build I played was with the sharp/power kicks. To do these, you hold down R2 while pressing the button, the player winds up to take the kick, and unleashes a shot that could be compared to something like the Predator Kick from Adidas Power Soccer from way back in the day. It’s not that extreme, of course, but it’s definitely more marked. The problem with this is that R2 has also been mapped to sprint. So, if you’re running down the wing and want to float a cross in, you have to let go of R2, which results in a slight animation as the player slows down, then put the cross in. If you’re somehow still holding R2, you’ll start a power cross. This is shown by a different coloured bar underneath the player icon, and it’s immediately apparent that things don’t feel quite right. If you’re sprinting in to reach a cross or through ball and hit it first time, it’s the same thing. It just doesn’t feel good, and bursting into the box to stroke the ball calmly into the top corner is going to be a very tricky thing to get used to, if indeed you can at all. There were a few times as well where attempting to hit a “finesse” style shot resulted in cancelling everything that the player was doing and the ball rolled loose. Combined with the other issues, just points to something that doesn’t feel ready for primetime just yet.
Source:
https://www.nextgenbase.com/efootball-2022-preview-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/