This is PES2014 all over again, and I don't mean that as a swipe at Konami or the team behind this game, but at US.
Set all bugs aside. Twisty arms and floaty UI elements are obviously not a feature meant to be appraised as part of the game. That (the game) is what's interesting me. At 2am last night I thought 'wow, we were all wrong, there is going to be so much love for this direction...' Er.
This eFootball Beta shows us a game with slow, ponderous, sometimes cumbersome animations and ball movements. And that's what I want. I want to have to relearn how to play a football game. If this was the final gameplay, if they cleaned up the bugs I'd be happy as the famous Larry.
One detail I love. It is very common to run the ball out of play because you assume you can squeeze sprint without consequence. Nobody here would say 'arcadey' about this game. It's mainly chortling about Alpha-like bugs and glitches.
Oh, and there are fouls. Fouls everywhere. Every match so far has finished with an abundance of them. I know that many of the fouls are PES2014-style 'momentum fouls' (similar to the PES2020 fouls that also got howled down by the community that claims to want fouls... just not those fouls).
Yes, the clearly unfinished state of the package overall is shocking. But what else is shocking is the gleeful meme-like reaction to the gameplay. If you want and expect an arcade game with instant 1:1 corntrol, this isn't it. Hold on a few months, though, and I suspect you'll get your wish.
NB: game played on Series S, Level 3 passing, Custom Stadium. Apart from occasional choppiness at Old Trafford, the graphics are great for me. I'm also a PC player and haven't tried that yet (I'm braced for a familiar PC Day 1 mess; if there's technical shit happening, we tend to get the shittiest end of the stick on that platform). There's a PC modder called Holland who specialises in slow, physical gameplay mods, and insists on playing at -2 speed. I'm interested to hear what he has to think of eFootball.