Not sure you should bother mate, I kept hold of it for a while and it's been awful, especially in ML mode.
There are so many glitches and problems with the game I could write half a bloody novel on them. Seriously.
Unless there's something I'm missing that the in-game tutorials don't tell you, tackling is totally random. Either the player wins the ball, or you 'clip' the attacker and give away constant free kicks, or probably one in every two times the AI will glide past your challenge like you're not there. No idea how to consisently win the ball.
But worse than that, thanks to some spectacularly selective and terrible AI positioning of your defenders off screen, I conceded FOUR goals in one ML match, and similar goals in other matches, due to the game doing this;
YouTube - A
Note I was trying to cut out the cross, so I didn't get control of the defender marking the striker until the ball was in the air and the AI had already decided to make my player stop, move the other way for a second, and basically leave the striker in acres of space in which to score.
This happens CONSTANTLY. It's driving me nuts. The AI keeps making my defenders off the ball move away from the attacker they're marking until the critical moment before it hands control over to you. Bad AI? Cheating AI? Who knows.
The AI on top difficulty levels stat boosts to a ludicrous degree. Take Shimizu, he's a nippy 77 rated winger. Now I repeatedly passed the ball to him into space, in behind his marker, and their left back repeatedly ate up the ground on him then shoved him off the ball. Shimizu, who was sprinting after a loose ball would have a 10-15 yard head start on the AI left back and yet he'd still catch Shimizu up and get to the ball first. Afterwards I checked their stats and Shimizu had acceleration and sprint speed stats way in excess of the AI. So it's bullshit.
On top of that, ML has a ton of problems. You pick players week in week out, then rest them for one game because their stamina is low and they come knocking on your door unhappy with being 'constantly' left out of the team, asking why can't they ever get a game etc. Terrible.
Other times I was chasing loose balls with Schwarz and the game was on rails. It wouldn't, unless I used super cancel to break the 'lock' over his movement, allow him to get to a loose ball despite being closer than the defender. He'd run in an odd arc around the movement of the ball, not letting me just direct him to the ball, which conveniently gave the AI defender time to get to the ball first.
On other occasions, one notably, their keeper parried a shot, it fell straight to Ordaz. I pressed R2 to control the rebound, which he did, but then it 'locked' him into a sideways dribble animation I couldn't break out of. He ended up dribbling the ball sideways off for a goal kick with an empty net in front of him because his animation somehow broke all control of him. Really bizarre and awful at the same time.
ANOTHER occasion, the ref penalised Ettori for turning a defender and going through on goal. He turned, the defender clipped Ettori with his hand as he was running, somehow the play stops and a free kick against Ettori, and a clear goal chance goes due to awful hit detection and clipping issues.
Straight up the other end, the AI randomly gives itself a penalty. I'm jockeying a guy on the ball, why I don't know because generally it doesn't do anything, but then the AI makes a fellow defender slide in on him from the side. Penalty, and I lose the game. Depsite this, the replay actually shows that there was clear daylight between the tackle and the guy who was supposedly fouled, and who actually didn't stumble, fall, anything, because no-one ever touched him.
Such double standards from the AI, it's crazy. Just can't get into this at all, it feels scripted, on rails when you don't have the ball and mainly due to the scripting, the refs STILL haven't been fixed, keepers awful, AI catch up when you have the ball in acres of space and at full speed, animation 'locks' constantly and make my players do odd stuff, the list is endless.
Oooh, one final gem. The AI crosses the ball over, I have a man positioned perfectly to cut out the cross and head clear. So I charge up the button to clear the ball. The power bar fills underneath him, then seems to freeze, then as the ball reaches him, the power bar disappears and he actually DUCKS out of the way of the ball and allows it to go into the six yard box. Great.
Oh and ML. Why have they made stuff such as training worse? You could individually train players before, train them to have player cards over long periods etc, but nope, Konami decide to remove a good feature and put in this really inflexible, stupid training system in. They introduce player interaction, but whatever the players say doesn't even make sense half the time.
So rushed and buggy, it's a mess of a game.
