- DEFENDING: Defending positioning is poor at its best. Again 5 or 6 players inside small area is the only thing CPU can do to defend. Again CB doing stupid runs out of position. Still Side backs being NEVER in position. The player will be at 1 inch from the ball and don't grab it for any reason, too fustrating when you have the feeling of playing alone. Positioning doesn't mean a thing in this game.
- COLLISIONS: Plain awful. It's a lottery and neither does the position, speed or any logical attribute seem to affect in a coherent way. I've seen the ball trespassing everything all the time, when pressing a player you don't have any sense of physical struggle. Really I wouldn't trust anyone who defends this collision engine.
- BALL PHYISICS: Deflections are real fun. I laughed a lot at them. Match Day had more coherent deflections than this game. Last year the deflections went straight to the nearest CPU guy. Now they go to ANY CPU guy, in an unprecedented twost of physic laws or any logic. Simply put, deflections seem to be runned by a 3 or 4 lines-length script. The behaviour of the ball in passes is too heavy, like playing in jupiter gravity, and it seems a little steel ball sliding in glass. It's like a pinball.
- SHOOTING: Scripted again and letting you not much freedom. Sometimes even if you aim for the near post, the shot will go to the farthest. In 1 vs 1, most times the ball just goes straight to the keeper, like last year, even if you were pressing the "finesse shot" with R2.
- NETS: They move quite well, but honestly, that shape hurts my eyes, it's like an amateur field.
- OVERALL GAMEPLAY: End to end action, no midfield at all, you don't need to build up. Overall, the positioning and runs of players are so odd that simply one or two passes will let you alone with the goalkeeper, playing the wings is so easy.
- DIFFICULTY: The only thing Konami has done in recent years is adding scripting to the gameplay, thus making his most beloved patterns emerge and reducing your freedom as a player. This edition involve major cheating by the cpu again, the typical "oh, no, now your team is shit by no reason and the speed of the passing is reduced to 50% and you miss chances and a single CPU player can pass through (literally, no clipping there) anyone. They will outrun you if they must while your striker is being caught, but suddenly the game unblocks again and you score easily. Overall, you don't control the pace of the game AT ALL.
-FLAWS: Is it worth mentioning that cutbacks are again in?
- GRAPHICS: Faces are awesome. Really. Crowd is not that bad, I quite like it in HIGH settings, there's a technical challenge there to improve that. Stadiums are weak in my opinion. Pitches are not very good, just ok.
- ANIMATIONS: Quite poor. Ridiculous when running, really. Besides, it seems there's no procedural animation, so one animation begins when the prior one finishes. That's the feeling and it's odd. While FIFA demo struggled in response times, this one is like having to wait for one animation to begin the next one.
- TEAMVISION: ehem... ehem... we will pass this one.
Well, I'm too let down by this crap demo. Konami is being so lazy, so greedy that they're not worth of the money. PES6 was the worst one, general consensus there even between fanbase. Now it's going down quickly. It's a shame because I was obsessed with the pes series, playing off and online until pes6 came. But now I don't feel the urge to play this game. Even if they added dog heads to the edit section.
I laugh when I hear people talking about being only a demo and the final product a huge huge improvement. Nonsense. If you know, even barely, how a game is developed, you know the last 2 months are used to tweak, polish and marketing and distribution. After the so-called 2 years in development (the only reason that would take 2 years to develop is that only 15 people were working on it), the demo represents the major aspects of the game, and the core engines are there (they simply ported the ps2 egnine to next-gen, obviously). There won't be any significant change in the game, not in the physics, not in the collisions detections, not in the atmosphere, not in gameplay modes, not in features. Really, I had big hopes for this game, but Konami deserves a big slap.
at least this year..
