By Dream King - See all my reviews
I have been a huge fan of WE7 and I was definitely expecting at least slightly better gameplay for this one. I am deeply disappointed. This game makes me think of crashing my laptop on a regular basis and there is not enough words for the frustration I am having.
The first thing I noticed was the more fluent controls the game has compared with WE7. But the following days, as I started to get deeper into the game, I noticed lots of problems with the game:
1) The success rate of penalties in the game for a difficulty of 3 stars is around 1/3. Every time you are awarded a penalty you are having a few seconds of happiness just to watch the keeper punch the ball back to the field. You want to run to the ball which is just a few meters away before the defence but the player just rejects to move. Other times, the player just kicks the penalty outside.
2) There is no randomness in the game, as opposed to WE7. For example if you approach from the same angle on a one on one with the keeper, you always get the same result. After playing the game for 2 weeks, I clearly know what is gonna happen even before i make the move.
3) The keeper is 5 times a "human" keeper, which reminded me of the early EA sports FIFA series. In WE7, if you are very close to the post and shoot it, the keeper just watches the ball go in, which is very realistic. In this game keeper shows a super-human strength and saves it. Especially if you like scoring from outside, WE8 is not the game for you.
4) One good thing about WE8, compared with WE7 is, the bookings are very realistic. You don't get random yellows and you always get a booking when you (feel like you) deserve it.
5) Menus are very fast which was not the case in WE7. This is maybe the only thing I liked about WE8.
6) In WE7, in a one on one situation, the players that are chasing you could not reach you easily. In this one, unless you make a "super-hiper" dribble (which takes a couple of seconds to accelerate), they catch you like a chicken. Usually you hit the keeper before you get into that accelerated mode, so basically there is no easy "one to one" in the game, which is not realistic.
7) Headers from the post area, if the player is marked by another player, always goes high above the post. There is no slight randomness in it. The only way to score from a corner is to send the long pass before the defence gets into position. The fact that scoring is not possible after the defence gets into position, is very unrealistic.
8) There was a huge problem with player cursor selection in WE7. If you hope they fixed it, you are quite wrong. The player closest to the ball is selected regardless of the key being pressed. As a result, you press "down" hoping that the player above the ball will run down towards the ball, but what happens is the game chooses the player below the ball and you end up moving that player away from the ball. Then to fix it you press "up" and this time the game selects the upper player and you end up moving this player too away from the ball. The opponent is one to one with the keeper in the end. This happens almost in every game. As an amateur programmer, I can see that it is very simple to fix that by just taking into consideration the key being pressed. I don't know what Konami people were thinking when they were programming it...
As my last words. Don't buy this game. Instead buy WE7. If you already have WE7, don't ever give it away to your friend hoping than WE8 would be better. I did it and I'm in pain. It is much realistic than WE8 and FIFA-2005. If you have FIFA-2005, WE8 can be a slight upgrade (definitely not in terms of graphics).
