Developed/Published by: PES Productions / Konami
Released: 20th September, 2013
Completed: 9th July, 2014
Completion: Won the World Cup as Scotland (on penalties versus Uruguay in a 0-0 nailbiter.) That’s all that matters, really (though I did also play Be A Legend as Messi, lazily, for a while.)
Trophies / Achievements: 38%
Football! Yes, we’ve gone football mad here at exp. Towers, what with the World Cup and everything (though that’s finished by the time you’re reading this, which means that we’re no longer football mad and are instead football sane.)
Whenever there’s a big international tournament (because the Old Firm has led met to basically distrust and fear club football) I tend to like to play a footy game, and it’s almost always Sensible Soccer (I usually go to the bother of finding the most recent update files and everything.) However I decided to actually try a “modern” football game for the first time in years and years, and it was this one!
Note I put “modern” in quotes there, because the weird thing about PES 2014: Pro Evolution Soccer is that—and this is probably not news to people who buy football games every year, or whatever—it feels like a game that could have come out on PS2. I mean… it looks like one too, sorta. shonky animations, character faces that—unless they’re a star—are generic, crap crowds, awful, repetitive commentary…
It’s sorta weird! And retro! But not in a good way, like Sensible Soccer. In a way that makes me think all the way back to this series when it was International Superstar Soccer on Nintendo 64, except faster?
In fact, after playing a few quick exhibitions I decided to scale back my ambitions from “I’m gonna download all the fan-made real team information and play this seriously!” to “let’s win the World Cup with Scotland and call it a day.”
It’s important to note, however, that if you look past all the surface stuff, PES 2014 still plays a decent game of footy. Don’t play it on Beginner (at all) otherwise you’ll spank every team like they’re Brazil (a sentence that now makes sense after this World Cup) but on Regular, it’s fun! You know, football. Passes, through balls, that sort of thing. It’s not very exciting, you’d probably call it workmanlike, but scoring a goal still feels amazingly rewarding, so there’s that.
Will I ever play it again? No. Next time (Euro 2016, probably) maybe I’ll pick up a FIFA. Those feel “new” right?
Final Thought: I didn’t really discuss why I put PES 2014 down so fast, did I? Indeed, I’m sure there are many, many people out there who want to moan about my surface take on this, after all the website crows about the game’s “trueball tech” and the “M.A.S.S. (Motion Animated Stability System.)“ Even if that was all incredibly apparent, there’d still be the UI.
This is a game where, in the flagship modes are “Be a Legend” and “Master League”, you spend a lot of time in menus. It’s also a game where literally every screen has a loading screen after it. Where information that could all be on one screen is spread across two or three. Where getting from one football match to the next—even if you don’t touch or change anything—can take two or three minutes.
It’s gash; it takes all the imagined fun of “being a footballer” or “managing a football team” and replaces it with all the fun of “watching loading screens” and “turning off the music because there are only six songs” and “stopping playing this forever.”
