Sat down with my new PS4 and some of Canadas finest medicinal plant matter last night and had a loooong session, unfortunately PES 2015 its very much a diamond in the rough. I say unfortunately because its the same thing that hampered the great PES games of last generation(2011 & 2013) where the core of the game is phenomenal but its let down by some things that are a little difficult to see past.
The ball is great, the weight makes passing, shooting & dribbling very satisfying. In a way its such a small thing but it affects the whole game and takes it to another level.
The physics are decent, I have seen some nice bend, swerve, spin and dip but now that we are on the new machines the ball should not be resetting with every touch.
The shooting is very, very good. I tried manual at first, once I got the hang of direction it felt very overpowered and lacked variety. I then went to basic shooting and found that I had full control over direction just like manual but now also had greater control over power and shot type was context sensitive and there was a big variety of shots. There is one thing that I found very annoying, which was also present in the passing game that I will list separately.
Passing is a bit hit and miss. 1 bar was to assisted for my liking and when on 0 bar I will sometimes misdirect silly little passes that no pro footballer would, its a bit to manual. PES 2013 had PERFECT 0 bar passing, they need to recreate it.
This comes with a caveat but good googly moogly Konami have really excelled with pass variety, when you have a skilled passer the game opens up tremendously. The weight you can put on passes and the power and accuracy at which they are hit is very apparent with the great passers.
My one gripe with the shooting and the caveat to the great passing variety is weaker foot. Weak foot accuracy and frequency is way to high. All to often the player will use his weak foot instead of the correct animation with the stronger. Konami have never got this wrong before and I dont understand why its happening now but I hope it gets ironed out.
Dribbling could be absolutely incredible if it were not for the poor transitions both in animation and speed. There needs to be graduation in acceleration, FIFA does this well. It seems to me that the poor animation transitions are there because the player will go instantly from a walking animation into a full sprint animation, there needs to be a build up. When you let go of the stick with a sprinting player he will take a short time to decelerate and it is not awkward or clunky, why they did not apply this same logic to acceleration I dont know.
The ball feels quite loose and good use of R2 is necessary in most situations. The agility and control of the top dribblers stands out a mile when closed down or receiving the ball in tight situations.
Because of the liberated ball I feel as though I can put it exactly where I want and this has a knock on effect over the passing and shooting.
Speed is a weapon now, wrong foot a player with a pacey player and its over, no more ketchup bug.
The heavier less technical players do feel a bit too heavy and clumsy though, I think the game may benefit from a very slight increase in speed, if the option was available I would play on +1.
AI is something that could be improved at times. It may be my lack of understanding but in defense my midfielders are very statuesque, they stick rigidly in formation and wait to be mover manually. Its possible that the option for the team to be more fluid will solve this, I will experiment tonight. Other than this it seemed good, especially the CPU team.
I did not delve too much into the tactics but it seems good. I dont think Konami have their teams set up right, there is far to much space in midfield. I liked the new feature where you use the D-Pad to push the team up field, however only being able to do this when defending and having it reset every time you gain possession is weird, it should stay put until changed.
Overall its a very good game but it could of been great, truly great. The issues with weak foot, animations and acceleration really take some of the shine off. Now that the focus is on the next gen machine, as long as they focus on evolving what they have, I expect next years game to be quite brilliant.
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