Still not quite feeling this game, I have to say.
I've been looking closely at the problems I have with it, and trying to work out which are down to me and which are down to the game itself. For example, I still have a bit of a problem with the passing (on pretty much any passing assistance level, weirdly - although I'm playing on 0 for now), regularly putting the ball behind the man I'm trying to pass to, messing up simple 5-yard balls, etc. It's kind of weird, because intricate passing has always been my main strength in PES, but I know it's my fault because I'm not used to the new mechanics: in three months' time I'll find it quite amusing that I couldn't pass straight to begin with. But there are also problems which are in the game - someone posted a diagram on here showing how, if a teammate is standing between you and another teammate further away, your player will always pass to the man nearest to him even if you max out the power in an effort to reach the guy further away, and this usually leads to surrendering possession. I've tried playing on semi-assisted, assisted and unassisted cursor switching, and it happens in every one.
What's more, this seems to be linked to a wider problem (which I think is a hangover from the cursor-switch bug on the last game). In PES2011, problems arose when the ball was in between two players, and the cpu would get confused and usually only let you have control of the wrong one. In PES2012, when you release the ball, the cpu always selects the recipient - and in the same way it couldn't judge who was best placed to reach a loose ball in the last game, here it often misjudges who should go to receive the pass. One of my favourite passes is the backwards through ball (where you send a gentle through ball sideways and behind you, into the path of a deeper player: the ball goes into space and he comes forward to collect it, and your original player stays where he is for a return pass if needed). It was pretty essential in PES2011 when you were playing possession football. In this game it often doesn't work very well, because the cpu will sometimes think you're trying to pass to someone miles away - often a centre back - who will come running madly up the pitch with no hope of receiving the ball (while the actual intended target stands and stares). The opposition collect the ball, your centre back is now miles out of position... goal.
Sure, there are ways around this, but it feels so unnatural and makes it much harder to play a composed passing game, because at any second a simple pass meant to retain possession could go astray, not by a yard (which could be put down to realistic error) but by 20, 25 yards. I wouldn't mind if you just missed the guy you were aiming at, and he could adjust his run to try and reach the ball. But he ignores the pass (and can't be selected in time), and a very safe pass becomes a nightmare error which gifts the other side a goal. I thought it was just me not aiming carefully enough - but then I realised that even on wide cam, you can't actually tell if there's a centre back offscreen, directly in the line of your pass, ready to leave his post and sprint stupidly up the pitch... so you never know whether it's worth risking the sideways pass or not. It's like the game's encouraging you to go forwards all the time.
What's with the defenders being sucked forwards, too? Even if I set my defensive line deep, they seem to spend a lot of time hanging around the halfway line, which would be fine if they knew how to play opposition strikers offside. Time and time again, the AI will ping a couple of passes, suck my dumb CBs forward, then release a through ball for an uncatchable striker, who beats the non-existent offside trap somewhere near the centre circle. I know PES has stolen a few things from FIFA 11, but I would have said that "one defender always playing the opposing striker onside, leading to millions of one-on-ones" was a feature best left where it was. Funnily enough, setting offside trap to "on" doesn't seem to solve this problem.
My real bugbear, though, is still the game speed. In Demo 1, the ball moved incredibly slowly along the ground, but players moved unrealistically fast. Rather than close the gap by slightly increasing short pass speed, Konami seem to have just upped the game speed even more - which doesn't solve the slow-ball problem (it still moves a bit too slowly along the ground) and massively worsens the other, bigger problem of unrealistically frantic player movements. The game plays at an acceptable speed with the South American teams - faster than I'd like, but acceptable - but Spurs v Bayern is a bloody joke. What's the point of coding a sim when it plays out at arcade speed?
(No, I can't drop the game speed, because online will be fixed at 0, and I don't want to get used to a nicely-paced game then go online and feel like a player from the Portuguese division 2 who's just been dropped into the Premier League. And no, I can't just control the pace of the game and keep it slow, because as soon as the opposition gets the ball it'll suddenly go back into fast-forward mode, like everyone's just had a hit on the crack pipe, and that looks even worse.)
I've said this before, but where exactly is the active AI in this demo? I mean on my team. Yes it's much better than 2011, and when I'm in possession someone will overlap and someone will come short and offer themselves for a pass... but is that all there is? When attacking, I still get the sense of a lack of movement ahead of me, unless I start spamming one-twos and so on. Haven't seen any dummy runs, diagonal runs, anything like that, or if I have they've been so subtle they haven't been much use. I saw the AI score a goal with some great Javier Hernandez-like movement (a back-and-forth shuffle in the box to shake off a marker, like his goal against Bolton the other day) but I've buggered if my players do anything like that.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen some great, intelligent movement from my forwards during quick-passing moves around the edge of the box - scored a lovely goal with Internacional that way - but deep-lying playmakers and classic No.10s seem almost useless, because when they get the ball more than 20 yards from goal, there's so little going on ahead of them. Funny thing is, if Konami hadn't released all those mouthwatering promo vids, I wouldn't know what I was missing and would be praising the improved AI, which really is fantastic when it works. It just seems a bit, I dunno, selective.
Something not right about the general feel of the game, too - still has that "rubbery" feeling from the first demo, because of the elastic-band dribbling, the unpredictable ball physics, the jerky animations and the freaky stop-start acceleration. Makes me queasy.
It's not totally frustrating - now and then, football will break out on the pitch and suddenly the game looks like the best and most realistic football sim I've ever played. But I'm not finding that all the time, and when this game is bad it's really bloody irritating. Like I say, I'm hoping most of my frustrations are down to me not quite clicking yet, and many of them probably will be. But some of the stuff I've mentioned here is clearly the game fucking up, not me, and right now it's driving me off the hinge.