I went for 5 there are far too many issues to call this a good game. Main ones being
1. Defending is broken there is no skill or technique to it, I have played it for ages and even had dozens of tries to get the gold medals in the training challenges. Even if you position your defender correctly and time your tackle the attacker often seems to dribble straight through your tackle or puts it through your legs. Interceptions are random too again despite positioning yourself between the player with the ball and the guy hes trying to pass too often the pass goes inches past the defender who makes no attempt to get the ball then at other times he miscontrols and it magnetically goes back to the other team almost every time.
As for the second player press button it is again useless, try doing the challenges related to this button and you will soon see that 75% of the time the player will not get the ball and the attacker will dribble past him as if he wasn't there, it took me over 150 tries to get the gold medal on this training challenge and in the end I realised that most of the time it will fail. At first I thought I would get used to it but I haven't, its very unpredictable.
Also the number of free kicks you give away is too high, with alot of good tackles being penalised.
2. The broken defending means that online is just full of people with speed merchants up front who dribble in a straight line past your helpless defenders.
3. The main way to score online is to give the ball to a fast player and dribble There is no need to pass it about or try and build play just pass it to a fast player and run forest run!
No need to run towards goal either just run down the wing cut 90 degrees inside and run horizontally straight across the front of goal while all the defenders spectate and score past the keeper who is easily beaten from even the tightest angles. There have been many times when dribblers dribble horizontally towards the goal and score from impossible angles as the keepers are so bad.
4. The button to bring the keeper out is broken. If you press Y to bring the keeper out in online mode he ignores the player with ball and watches while the attacker dribbles into an open net. So there is no point doing this unless you are sure to get the ball.
5. Spamming lofted through balls. Online is full of people who just play lofted through balls to fast strikers no matter where they are on the pitch. It is the second most common way to score.
6. Master League Online does not take account of how good your opponent is when giving out money. I am thinking of quitting MOL because of this I have a team with 2-3 of the default players left and about 8-9 of 70 odd rated players but it is no fun when you are constantly playing people with a much better team and have no hope of winning, even more annoying is when you play someone who is completely rubbish at the game but wins because they have a much better team. Last night my first match was against a guy with etoo and messi in his team and I got beat 1-0 and got about 1 million the next match was against a master league default team and I won comfortably and got 1.7million, yet my 1-0 loss was a much better performance but there is no reflection in the money. It means those who joined early and play alot have lots of easy wins against lesser teams meaning they get easy money and rankings.
7. Scoring goals almost straight from kick off. It infuriates me when you have just scored and from the kick off its played wide to someone who either runs down the wing and crosses or plays a through ball. It has happened to me quite a few times where a team scores two passes after kickoff and there is nothing you can do about it.
8. Goalkeepers - yes they're hopeless.
9. The active AI isn't as good as in the demo, players are not making the intelligent runs that they were in the demo.
Sadly I think this is the beginning of the end for PES, it is obvious from this forum that there has been a huge drop in interest in PES as there are so few topics and threads compared to other years. As not many people are playing it and I think sales figures will be disasterous which means Konami will cut the budget and spend less money on the next version.
