PS3, xbox 360 After the rigmarole of picking a team (mostly unlicensed, so you get the real Manchester United, but Aston Villa are West Midlands Village) you’re on the pitch, ready to guide your team to victory. Attacking players have more of a pulse this year. Instead of tottering level with the ball carrier waiting to be marked out, they’re far more inclined to take a run behind enemy lines, dashing down the wings and even making the occasional slanted run in the middle of the pitch.
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Gone are the days when you’d stand outside the opposition’s box with one foot on the ball, shouting at your men to sodding do something, only to be kneecapped by the sliding boot of a defender moments later. If your men are starting to loiter, you can command one to start running with a quick point and click of the right stick (play with a joypad, people!). It’s an essential move that bypasses occasional AI lethargy and gives you much more precise control.
On the surface it looks like not much has changed in the yearly updated world of Pro Evolution Soccer, but a lack of big new tournaments or flashy features masks the huge work that’s gone into improving the football itself.
But all that new attacking movement can leave defenders stuck in the mud. For the most part they’re sensible, but their refusal to dive in for a necessary crunching tackle means that a pressing team can get away with too much. On one occasion a simple clearance from a corner reached my pacey young striker, Gabby Agbonlahor. I’d caught the opposition on the counterattack and Gabby had the entire pitch to run into. delivering so much as a shifty elbow. I scored an easy goalso in the dirt at the
The two Liverpool central defenders had taken up sensible positions, and dutifully dashed in to sandwich my lone striker as he powered towards the box. They ran alongside him for a full ten metres without delivering so much as a shifty elbow. I scored an easy goal when I should have ended up in the dirt at the halfway line.
Konami tried (and failed) to beat EA's Fifa franchise at its own high-accuracy game in 2010, so this year Konami has gone to the other extreme. PES 2012 is deliriously attackorientated, sacrificing niceties such as realism in favour of constant end-to-end thrills of the most inauthentic kind.
No surprise, then, that matches in PES 2012 tend to be high-scoring affairs, but it’s forgivable given how much better the football feels this time around. Everything is faster and more precise. While FIFA’s trick stick has players performing ever more convoluted manoeuvres, PES is about passing and team movement. Matches are far more lively and competitive as a result.
That's not to say PES 2012 is without innovation. The intelligence of team-mates is improved, with the tendency for players to flock to the ball replaced by dynamic off-theball runs, overlapping full-backs and properly organised defensive units. More emphasis is placed on the right-sided control stick, enabling you to instigate runs and offer support to the player with the ball. But PES 2012's major failing is a serious one: its physics engine. The movement of the football just doesn't convince – it's so random you expect every kick to be accompanied by the "pang!" noise that comes from whacking the sort of 99p footballs sold in newsagents.
It would be wrong to point to one big factor as the reason behind PES’s revival. It’s the result of a number of incremental improvements on the pitch. Players are more responsive on the ball, a tricky attacker feels different to a lumbering defender, the animations are more convincing, the crowds noisier and attacking play is enormously improved. PES still struggles to offer anything its monolithic competitor FIFA can’t do with more polish, but 2012 is an incisive diagonal run in the right direction. If only the defenders were a little braver. Just as every England manager is appointed as a reaction to the previous one, so every PES is a response to the last. So that isnt why my head hasn’t stopped thin-
The ever-popular Master League and Become a Legend modes are retained, now under the banner of Football Life, and a Club Boss mode has been added, For More Information Go to: www.fifa.com www.pes.com
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