I played it loads tonight and talked to a few people and we were all coming to relatively similar conclusions - some of us do enjoy PES's style slightly more than others I think, but generally, this demo has got so, so much wrong.
Graphically it's great up til a point. At certain distances they look poor, and up close.. well they are OK. I'm not seeing the 'amazing' faces though. Some of them are great - but most of them are surprisingly poor.
Take a look at this ABSURD one. This is by FAR the worst, by the way, but it explains to me what is wrong with all of the pictures - and it's that they exaggerate the imperfections of a face MASSIVELY. Fabregas and Silva, both young people in real life, look like old men! A small facial wrinkle is made into a thick line
Now, Pirlo looks NOTHING at all like that. It's not even close. There are blemishes and deep facial wrinkes that you wouldn't see on an eighty year old, let alone a perfectly good looking man (no homo - but seriously, if I was Pirlo I'd consider litigation!).
Even the faces which do look OK, they are more like over-exaggerated caricatures than human faces, and they are also pretty much solid, so they look really, really bad when moving. I'm not really a guy who cares that much about aesthetics but I think the amazement over the graphics is way, way over the top (and of course, the kind of thing which PES fans used to scornfully attack FIFA fans for - caring about that over gameplay). Whether FIFA's faces are better is another question entirely, by the way, I just think the praise is massively unfounded.
Otherwise, the graphics are pretty good. Pitch colours are nice, which is a change because by God they've been bad over the years, and they do look more realistic than FIFA's too-good-to-be-true limey shades. The bizarre fog effect on the other hand is ridiculous. I kept thinking to myself on corners - Oh look! Xavi's crossing from Dover t'wards Calais!
It would be one thing on an overcast day, but that isn't what we should be getting ont he demo settings.
Graphically I think they've done quite a good job, though they aren't as technically advanced as FIFA's (it's all very static), they do compete in areas, and win clearly in others.
The most important thing - of course - has to be the gameplay... and I have to say, I really don't feel it. It's glitchy and buggy as hell, but that is the tip of the iceberg. How much of this can be solved and will be solved before release is unknown, but currently I rarely have more than 5 actions (ie, a pass or a shot) without seeing at LEAST one instance of the ball fundamentally changing it's trajectory (impossible under Newton's First Law of motion kind of changes). Sometimes the ball will stop in midair, or randomly change direction - and it seems to be in aid of making the animations work.
Either this, or an animation will skip - or a player will fundamentally warp - or the animations will go bizarre 'til it seems plausible that his foot could have reached the ball. This leads to a very, very unpleasing game, and at the end of the day, whether or not it's graphics have improved, the worst thing of all is to be constantly brought back to the 'this is a game' mentality every 10-20 seconds because something which defies the laws of physics is occurring.
While PES used to be the game with the free-ball physics, it simply no longer is. The game is constantly cheating to allow the game to run smoothly. Whilst the ball IS free (it's not tied to the animations) it regularly has to glue itself together so the game will work, and, in these situation either the animation, or the realism, or the ball itself is being sacrificed. These issues are bugs, rather than fundamental design flaws, but they are what I can only imagine to be artifacts of an old engine being pushed to do what FIFA's animation engine can truly handle.
The 360 dribbling, as I said about two weeks ago in the main PES thread, is heavily restricted and there is a large caveat. It isn't true 360 - and I don't mean this in terms of directions. Whether it is 32 or 64 or 360, or anything in between isn't that important - there ARE definitely a lot of angles - the game doesn't want to allow you to play in them. In FIFA, which I believe has implemented the 360 perfectly, you cannot just run straight down a line without any imperfection. You will move a bit one way, a bit the other - and if you are on the wing you can take the ball off the pitch if you are taking it too close and not being cautious enough. This organic richness is one of the things which makes FIFA that much more convincing this year - and it's just not there in PES. I find that although I can now run in the 360 degrees, I am rarely allowed to when I want to, and the game still seems to want to run in the archaic old 8 directions.
The AI too is prone to this - it IS capable of running in the 360, but it very, very rarely chooses to do so. Whether this is true or not - it certainly leads me to consider whether, as some suspected, this feature was added at the last moment BECAUSE FIFA had it. EA had held back this feature because they wanted to get it right, and they have got it right. At this stage Konami have got it solemnly wrong - and it is not close to FIFA in the fidelity of this dribbling.
Both games seem to have some serious AI problems. Where FIFA has been criticised immensely (rightly in many cases), PES deserves the same lambasting. I - who haven't played a PES game seriously since PES6 - on my second game could already win against the top difficulty. That is ridiculous. I've been reading the impressions of others and I really can't see where they are coming from. How are the goalkeepers hard to beat? They are easy to beat. You can shoot almost right next to them. They seem to have no reach to their dives - they dive but they barely tilt over and fall flat. You don't need to stick the ball in the corner - you can just hit it and it will be fine.
The responsiveness is slow - and in some ways that can be a good thing - but the responsiveness in this game is nonsensical. In FIFA, the player will try to hit the ball as soon as he can - in PES, it just seems slow. This may have a bodge-effect of making it seem more realistic, but I really don't think it IS more realistic.
Before I move onto what I think is the crux of the PESvFIFA debate, the one REALLY positive thing on this game is the individuality - the really fine details. It's great to see players doing moves they pull off in real life, though I'm not enamored with the contextual way they are pulled off. They seem to often occur at the most useless of times, often making it more difficult for me to do what I want to do. This attention to detail is fantastic, but I do slightly feel that this obsessiveness is what should be Konami's secondary or tertiary priority - which I can't imagine it is, as it's the only thing I think they are doing really well.
The core gameplay, the gameplay which forgets whether you are using Messi or Gerrard, is what needs attention, and it needs it all over the place. It's great to have this individuality and I really hope that FIFA can start working on this HEAVILY next year, but I prefer a game which feels... complete and lacking the fine touches than the other way round.
The final thought I have is that it's fascinating to see how much more PES does for you. I find it very hard to break the mould. Very hard to take control of the way my team play, without fiddling around with the endlessly deep but ridiculously overwhelming tactics (also confusingly labelled and so forth).
If I want to play in a certain way on PES, I find it very difficult - my team wants to play in one way and it WILL play in that way, or I'll fail. Whereas in FIFA, I can, regardless of my set up at least TRY to play in a different way.
Not only this, but the level to which PES assists your primary attacking actions (passing shooting crossing) is extraordinary. I hadn't really remembered it. Though I'm a big-manual player on FIFA, even when I play on assisted it is nothing like this. I feel on PES that I have very little control over who the ball will go to. If there are two people on similar angles, it's pot luck - often ruining a move I want to try. So much more of the game is a matter of tapping a button and seeing it happen - and in fact I just feel generally a lot less in control of the whole thing. If this IS my fault, then perhaps I need to play more - but if I am playing badly - why can I win on the top difficulty?
PES 2010 is a huge improvement but I doubt many are going to be brought back from disillusionment with the franchise, unless there is a HUGE change in the final build.
same here thats going to be superb.
. Sorry for the short length I don't have the full version of Fraps so am limited to 30secs.