Ok so I played the first demo on PC and thought it was great. Downloaded the demo on Xbox last night and had a few games. I have to say my first game left me feeling a bit meh. Improved as the games went on but here are some thoughts:
Keepers - much improved. Caught more balls than I expected; parried some wide towards the corner, pushed some out for a corner. But they all looked correct and realistic in that particular context. Haven't seen any blunders as such where you think OMG what was that.
Not sure how people call them broken or terrible. They did most things I would expect from a real keeper and did it fairly well. Even on long shots that were going to the bottom corner, keepers often got across well instead of reaching out from a locked foot position. Impressed me all round.
Shooting - much improved. Makes more sense than 11 in how the shot trajectory is affected by your button press, how the ball is sitting etc. More variety in shots and headers. Really good.
CPU AI - in attack they are ruthless and seem to score any chance or half chance given to them in the penalty box lol. In defence, I find it quite hard so far to get many clear chances. At times it felt like I was Barcelona camped out on the edge of the box with the other team having parked the bus. A lot of my shots from distance were getting blocked.
Not that either of these two things are bad, but it happened more often than I would have liked and dropping it off to regular helped out.
Through balls seem to be less effective, compared to last year - which is a good thing. And I also found it hard to get in behind the defence to put many crosses in.
Ok now a couple of things that are annoying me:
- Passing. Don't have an issue with where the ball goes. But some of the passes just trickle and bobble along? Like if you kick off and pass to the midfielder at the edge of the circle, often the ball looks like its been rolled out weakly by hand rather than passed by foot.
And sometimes this happens across field as well. I can understand if you've mis-hit a pass it might bobble, but for those short passes it looks plain weird sometimes. FYI - I'm using 1 bar passing assistance.
Tied in with this is how the player receiving the pass just stands there waiting for it. I shouldn't have to use supercancel to receive a pass to feet from 20 metres away.
Game speed. I found it too quick on game speed 0. After a few games it seemed better but it's not really the speed of ball movement or player movement, but more the propensity for going forward. I felt the AI tried to go forward too quickly compared with how I spent time trying to build an attack.
Running: it made more sense to me last year. If I held the sprint button I would get one speed and if I tapped it I would get the little knock on happening. I've tried that this year and it seems more random. The long knock on sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. And I can't work out when it uses bursts or when it doesn't lol.
I need time to get used to it probably
Training ground anyone
Hate to say it but compared to last year, some of the player movement and ball trajectory on the ground looks a bit ice skatey still
But the collision engine and referee's/advantage are fantastic.
) far too quickly, Aaron Lennon being the prime example. In some situations I just want to jog or move about slowly (mark the space) but he moves so fast that he ends up closing down his man too quickly and committing too early.
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