Often hailed as the greatest footballing series of games ever, Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer, which is known in non-PAL territories as Winning Eleven, made it's name on Sony's PS2 console, taking advantage of the fact that EA's FIFA series was becoming stale and uninspired in the early 00s.
Pro Evolution Soccer was a good game at the time of it's release in 2001, but truth be told, it's hideously overrated, and is nowadays only really worth a look because it can be found for pocket money prices. In terms of cash, it's sequel, imaginitively titled
Pro Evolution Soccer 2(PES2) is just as much value for money, with my copy being picked up preowned for £5, granted it was missing it's instruction manual, but the controls really don't seem any different to the original game anyway.
As you can probably guess, PES2 doesn't have a story or anything, it's a sports game, where the idea is to win matches and I suppose in turn leagues and cups. It boasts all the regular gameplay modes, exhibition,tournament and so on, but with the exception of multiplayer usage of the former mode, where you will no doubt spend most time is in the Master League Mode. This now has three leagues, and you select a club team, which the computer comprises of fictional players, and you have to win your way to the top of Master League 1 from your begginings in ML3, buying up quality players to help you in this quest.
The mode is basically a season mode, except done a bit better, to allow for relegation and promotion and so on, and is definitely one of the places the game shines in. Granted it isn't perfect, the real players from the team are all available on free transfer, which meant that once I noticed this, I managed to completely rebuild AS Roma's first team, Totti and all, for minimum cost, allowing me to bring in other stars like Roberto Carlos and Jan Koller to add even more class to my team.
However, all of this would be worth nothing if the game itself played rotten, which Im glad to report it doesn't actually. It still isn't this uber-realistic depiction of the beautiful game that people seem determined to make it out to be, but it's still a pretty solid and fun depiction of it. The meat and bones of the gameplay are good, with players actually seeming to have developed some form of decent AI in terms of both computer controlled team-mates and opposition players, with them actually doing things such as making runs and defending properly. The passing in this game is a lot better than the prequel, as is the general shooting, your team-mates also give away less stupid free-kicks.
However, the gameplay isn't without it's issues, many people claim that the PES series in general is good because it's harder to score in, which is possibley the most painfully
wrong statement I've ever heard, get to the D outside the box and charge a moderately powerful shot and you have scored, almost every time, on any difficulty. Pretty simple. The game also features the same archaic free-kick system that went out of date around FIFA 98, which isn't good, or useful at all, as well as a habit of players getting injured far too often.
But for 2002, the gameplay is awesome, and compared to the prequel(and in fact the sequels) this is pretty superb. I mean it isn't flawless, or even my favourite football game ever, but with the TV on mute, it's often what I play while listening to music, occasionally to review here, it's brainless, pretty simple, but in general a fun way to keep the rest of me entertained while my ears are paying attention to the tunes.
And that's because the sound in this game is pretty terrible, generic cheesy music and commentary provided by ...someone, nobody of any importance anyway, and Trevor Brooking. It's probably one of the most repetitive and worthless commentaries ever, which is a shame, because it's attached to a good game.
Graphically the game is a little more pleasing. While the player models still don't exactly look realistic, they are good enough to play with, and look decent from the playing distance. The stadiums also look pretty good, even if they aren't based on real ones.
On that note, I suppose it's as good a time as any to bring up the fact that Konami still didn't have the license, so only some of the player names are real, and none of the team names are. The thing that puzzles me is that they changed team names that were fine in the original game. While I can understand not having Arsenal,Rangers,Juventus or Fiorentina, because they are totally unique names, I don't see how Roma or Barcelona could complain about those names being used, unless they were AS Roma or FC Barcelona, but the city name itself can't be copyrighted can it?
The team kits still look terrible, and this is made all the more frustrating by the fact that Umbro sponsor the game. While Umbro are fairly legendary for making ugly, and horrible to play in, kits, surely they could have designed some strips for the game, and teams like Celtic, whose kit at the time was made by Umbro, should have been able to have the correct shirt, just without the club badge and sponsor?
Controls are pretty much identical to the first game, so I'll give the same basic control outlook I did for that game:
X:Pass/Step in tackle
O:Cross/Slide Tackle
[ ]:Shoot
/_\:Through Ball
R1/R2/L2:Various types of sprinting
L1:Shot Modifier
R-Stick:Manual Pass
L-Stick/D-Pad:Move
While I've always preferred the FIFA layout, the controls are easy enough to get used to, and thankfully, their response has been improved upon immensely since the first game, and while first touch play is still worthless in the game, it just controls a hell of a lot better than the first game, although that really wouldn't be hard. It still isn't perfect control response wise,and at timesthe player movements can still seem sluggish, on the whole it controls well enough to get a blessing from me.
That last phrase actually sums up my views on the game pretty well, it does well enough to get a blessing from me. This isn't the footballing revolution it's often said to be, and at times it's actually worse than FIFA(I've never beaten Barcelona 9-0 in any FIFA, let alone with a team of fictional players), but what it cannot be denied is that it is a pretty fun game that all football fans with PS2 consoles will probably want to get their hands on at the shoestring-budget price it can be picked up for, because it's probably one of the best PS2 games I've played, and at that price, there cannot be many complaints.
Other Konami Football reviews
International Superstar Soccer Deluxe for Super Nintendo
International Superstar Soccer Pro for PlayStation
International Superstar Soccer 64 for Nintendo 64
International Superstar Soccer for Gameboy Advance
Pro Evolution Soccer for PlayStation 2
|
Gumtree.com
