Its interesting to hear of people liking the dribbling in the game, it's one area along with general responsiveness which i think isn't good this year at all. Even after the new patches.
Its not as good as last year with the main point on how slowly the player moves and turns with normal Left stick usage. Its one part the player moves too slowly, this affects every other aspect of the game and makes first time shots, volleys, goalkeeper positioning and many other aspects suffer since the difference between the sprint speed and dribble speed is too big! This leads to players stopping to adjust themselves too much and become locked onto rails on way too many because of this. Most of all the issue is players take too many touches to turn in general, this is all players regardless of ability. Something I've noticed since playing a lot of PES 2013 again how much better it manages change of pace for players compared to 2014.
PES 2013 is on the old engine but it's not on rails hardly at all (*cough* stumbling animation*) compared to 2014 where players get locked into rails as soon as any sprinting starts or finishes especially for headers in general and air balls.
This at the moment is bad for the short term but i like and appreciate Konami's long term vision here. Get the basics right, get players moving realistically and fluidly in the most basic ways done first and right then later build on it and make it better. Where 2014 clearly improves over 2013 is the right stick turns and feints which are gorgeous when executed and work really well. Everything looks and performs really well removing all the horrible, jerking, warping and snapping to grid from last years old engine.
The general responsiveness isn't good enough yet for us to see proper dribbling yet, Konami as you can see have made efforts to help alter and improve this so in later patches Messi and other small, agile dribblers do seem better and are able to dribble more effectively. Hopefully next year dribbling with be in two parts. The same PES 2014 dribbling when the left stick is pressed down for 'safe dribbling' and an PES 2013 system for normal movement, obviously without all the horrible last engine jerkyness.
As for the tactics, it's very good just like since 2011, issues are heart matches its redundant and the general responsiveness isn't good enough yet for tactics to show consistently for the full game but hey work very well, better than last year technically by some way, it's just not really as an all round product yet. Its one one hand never going to have as many options as Football Manager but it's actually quite close in terms of effectiveness.
Also night games are slower than day, and also at night it plays better.
