My impressions:
I played 5 games, all on Professional level.
The freedom is really there; in passing, in shooting and also on the tactical department.
To start with passing: You can certainly pass 360 degrees but the chance of succes is very much dependent on who passes.
With the teams in the Copa-América match, the passes were not that accurate as when you played with Barcelona. It took me about two matches to pass the ball around on an acceptable level. I scored one goal with the full manual passing-button, where I played a long and high pass for Ibrahimovic ( still in Barcelona ) who raced clear and scored in style.
Shooting is something which is made harder, more difficult. When your player has not yet controlled the ball, he will not score easily. That is the difficult point; most of the time you have to be quick, making shooting harder.
The ball is part of the freedom: At first I thought that the ball slowed down too fast, but in those cases I played a pure groundpass, and then it stays on the grass, making it slow down earlier. So I found out that you better could play the ball with more pace, after which coms from the ground a bit, resulting into a better pass. You have the feeling that the ball has more weight then in previous versions, which is good.
There is some discussion about the so called ping-pong passing, but I was noth able to recreate that on Professional level, so I asume that was a matter of the lower level assisting you to direct the passing.
The keeper is definatly better than in PES 2010. Balls are punched much more to the side, or at least as much outside the reach of an attacker as possible.
Of course, there are moments when the keeper makes a mistake, but it is well within acceptable margins.
A good thing is that you can direct the balls with goalkeeper-balls. Not extreme, but it is possible!
Strategy:
I tried different strategies and I must say: They work well.
You can order your players to move more often off the ball, which worked fine. You can also let your team choose wich strategies can be used on a particular moment of the match. So you can start with a passing game and play the long ball at the end of the match.
As far as I could see there was no card-system anymore. ( EDIT: They are in )
That had the consequence that the D-line-setting is back! Good thing!
Konami said they tried to make a game for the hardcore-fan and as fas as team-play is concerned, they succeeded in that goal.
It's just a matter of waiting for the final game to find out if they succeeded in that other hardcore department as well: Online gaming! If so, then they achieved something huge with PES 2011.
its winding me up, its not only on the PES2011 Demo though, dont know how to fix it :S
and pressing towards opponent or goal, nothing happens, CBs always backtrack and when you select one of them they take a split second to break out of being cpu controlled and sometimes that is enough for the attacker to get through. I have made some great tackles though, just poking the ball away at the last minute. But on the whole defending seems a bit wrong and broken.
