I've played the demo quite a bit now and although its very good, although the xbox could of gotten 10 min games to get a proper feel for it, I have two issues with it.
One is the powerbar for 0 bars pass assistance. Its a manual powerbar on this setting, but its badly done. While you can get the range of passes you need from the weak to the powerful, the powerbar is dreadfully unbalanced. There is a real lack of a range of passes you can achieve up to the midpoint of the powerbar which makes the latter part of the powerbar suffer because it has to fit in a bigger range in order to achieve the full range of powered passes to compensate for the lack of range up to the midpoint. You have to input nearly over half of the powerbar in order to get a decent powered pass which doesn't feel natural. It should take less of the power bar to do it and every pass that can be achieved powerwise up to that midpoint each sequentially are not very much different from each other in power. So much so some of them are pointless because they have no real effective difference and should be removed from the range, thereby making it quicker, more natural and less powerbar input to pull off a decently powered pass and a more of a real noticable effective power difference between your passes. The powerbar is not sensitive enough up to the middle of it.
After the midpoint, the upper ranges are far too sensitive due to the lack of range up to the midpoint because theres very little powerbar left to achieve the bigger range of effective powered passes thats left. So you go from very little effective difference and sensitivity between passes up to the midpoint and then suddenly after the midpoint even the slightest little extra bit of power makes a huge difference to how much power you get in your passes. Really unbalanced powerbar and badly done, hopefully they fix this.
Secondly, having to press the 'A' button twice is silly for making a tackle. The opportunity to win the ball is the split second you see the opportunity so I should be able to pull off the tackle straight away and that can only be achieved with one press of a button. The 'X' button should be used for this and secondary pressure moved to 'RT' or something like that. You can mistime a tackle easy enough at the moment because of the extra split second it takes to press the button twice, even though you can do it very quickly, a split second is all that a human or the AI needs to move out of your way just enough for you to miss the ball, cause a foul or both. For a truly effective tackle, I should be able to pull it off at the exact moment I need to. Please fix this!
Other than that I haven't enjoyed a PES as much as this in years and i'm pretty much content with everything else in it.
