OK final opinion after playing quite a bit in the last week:
The good: Excellent animations, solid shooting system, and good dribbling and passing systems.
The bad:
- Scripting: players switch to turbo mode when they chase through balls; defenders burn nitro when they chase attackers in space; goalkeepers broken, make saves they have no business making, never leave the goal-line, and because of that regularly concede goals from 4 meters out or deflect shots into the net. Also, the AI fouls you all the time, but the player never blows the whistle...
- Glitches: players watch the ball or run away from it, the game performs poorly on some machines, various physics glitches, the notorious corner glitch a few people mentioned, and so on.
- Poor AI: the players move around well enough, but the enemy team AI is atrocious, it makes bad decisions all the time, and it can only score with through-ball exploits which look scripted and lame. Worse, the pass-assistance system has been broken, and now your players will regularly make the worst possible pass in a given situation, whereas in the previous iterations of PES they would put the ball exactly where you want it to go.
- Low amount of content: The game includes the faces of only the more famous players; there are very few stadiums, and the "Konami" stadium sucks (in daytime the right-hand penalty area falls under shadow and it's hard to see what goes on in there); the ML is bare-bones (that's not necessarily bad, but IMO the ML from 2 years ago was more interesting); various licenses missing; in short, one can see Konami have started rebuilding from scratch.
- Lame features: "Advanced shooting" just doesn't work. The new penalty and free kick systems are OK. But they are also right out of the Fifas in the '90s, and they seem to miss the idea present in the old Konami games - arrows and such break the player's immersion. The "aimed" shot no longer works since it's too weak and the keeper never leaves his line. I don't even try long shots, since when I tried a few in training, the goalie caught all of them. Heading works but is unnecessarily complicated - you have to press the top button (through pass) after pressing the shot button, or, a lot of the time, your player would put the ball above the net.
Overall impression: When everything fits together, the game is fun and good looking. It's possible to score gorgeous goals. The ML is as addicting as ever. However, a lot of the time the player suffers from a myriad of minor problems, bugs, scripts, and glitches - and the gameplay experience deteriorates correspondingly.
So, as a lot of people say, we have a good game here, but also an unfinished game. Is it better than PES2013? Hard to say. As a total experience, probably not. But as a new experience, especially when the components of the game fit together, definitely yes.
Rating: A generous reviewer could give the game 8/10, while a harsher reviewer could give it 7/10.
