Tried eFootball for the first time in months last night, Only in authentic mode.
This game is so disappointing but not for the obvious freemium stuff, but in this offline mode, the game is very good and improves so many of QoL gameplay elements from a nearly 7 year old PES 2021 (if you consider it's a copy of 2020 that released 2019) and visually on PC the lighting and high quality face models look wonderful.
The AI is very challenging and surprises you with realistic plays, the players and dribbling is so much more responsive, having a mechanic for should tackling/standing tackles instead of being shackled to the experimental or dated mechanics of 2020 such as R stick finesse dribbling or double tapping X for tackles as well as the sluggish dribbling, eFootball feels like a contemporary evolution of what PES could've been.
This is why it's disappointing to play, you end up wanting the game to offer so much more in terms of offline modes, editing or modding but this is as far as Konami allow us to sample. If you have the sanity to venture online, it's clearly a different game. Latency issues, having no control of defenders who run around in every direction but at the attacker and the usual shameless buffing and nerfing.
I can dream one day someone can decompile or unlock the game files once and for all and free this game of it's capitalist hell.
Excactly my through, what i'm repeating since a long time. But not every version of Efootball have been good, offline on exhibition or not. My fav feature is the analog acceleration, and about defense it's day and night with others games (not only EA FC, players are really effective on that part which makes it the only current football game where you need to pass the midfield.
This season version is. The last or the one from september if i remember well was too fast and players too weightless. And contrary to PES on Fox, when you decrease the speed, it affect the sensations and /in a certain way/ inputs, it looks like they've just added lag.
And yes, graphically PES 2021 start to become a bit basic in comparison to what we got with Efootball and EA FC. Now, not graphically but "authentically" as there's zero edit mode, i still prefers visually olders Fox or even PS2.5 games just for the sake of having real kits but kits ressembling to real shirts.
Now about the faces for example : the basic facebuilds/choose of type of nose, brows, eyes are much much more looking human, on older PES players sometimes untouched since PES 2014 doesn't even looks like real persons. I would really like to test the creation mode for creating some Bundes faces (for example). Same as hairstyle : they're looking much more simple/real i mean in the good way than the one we got since PES 2014. For example there's not even a simple short haircut like naturally placed and up on the front. That's what my first and probably last Schwarzkopf paragraph.
Now regarding animations, the engine isn't as good as fox in that departement, but better have not tons of animations but in the good tempo and fitting with reality than tons of it but created from a sort of AI program like Hypermotion for example, or like Chris said if i remember well, the animations not fitting with the tempo imposed.
Normally if you got a very good engine and you leave his tempo like it should be, the result would enchains naturally movements without a feeling of accelerated Tex Avery impression, as that engine got the "data" from reality and don't overpass those limits.
