I've given the World Cup a go and managed to go all of the way and win it. I played on Professional, which is where I usually like PES since the CPU still offers a challenge while still making mistakes and feeling more organic, FUMA, to make up for the lower difficulty setting and because I enjoy the feeling of it even if eFootball messed it up a little when it comes to understanding who the pass is supposed to go to while player switching, Brazil, because I'm Brazilian. Now, I'm not going to lie, despite a few problems, the way eFootball plays offline is in a decent place, it doesn't feel too different from a standard Fox Engine PES at all, which is good considering how it started... but disappointing when considering how long it took just to get closer to where we already were. I'm getting used to the game play screen, though the simplicity of tactics still bothers me, at least it's not lagging much anymore, and the UI in general is still an eye sore, just like the turfs, which haven't been good since PES2019, I'm serious even the turfs on Tokyo 2020 and Mario & Sonic: Tokyo 2020 look a lot better than this, and those are titles where football is just one of many sports, with a more simple and carefree take on the sport. Still... I had fun overall.
Now, the mode is still a joke. When it comes to atmosphere, there is none, all of the World Cup matches I've played felt like friendly matches with the very same animation being played every time when winning a match, that's all, there's less atmosphere here than the World Cup mode in all previous PES titles, and even then it wasn't anything special mostly. Also, it doesn't feel like an actual competition... no top goal scorers, top assists, groups with an actual story, no way to look at the other groups or how every team advanced... just nothing, you're playing on a vacuum, which makes the friendly feel even worse. One last thing, and a major one for me... you can't play local co-op. I really wanted to play this with my dad, we do it every World Cup, we replicate the groups in the latest PES we own and go for it, but here it's not a thing since it's still technically online for some reason, even though I'm playing against the AI. I'm genuinely upset since this is the one thing I was excited about in eFootball, but they've bottled it again. Winning Eleven 3: Final Ver. & Winning Eleven 2002 both did the World Cup justice, 1998 and 2002 respectively, and I could play them with my dad over 20 years ago... what's Konami's excuse for this?