[First Impressions] PES 2010 demo

Exactly one week after the release of the FIFA 10 demo (read my -rather lengthy- impressions here), it was due time for Konami to release a demo for the latest edition of their long-running own football game series, Pro Evolution Soccer (PES). It's important to note that PES is FIFA's only real competitor in the market, so PES 2010 has an uphill fight in front of it already.

In my FIFA 10 impressions, I made an overly long introduction* about sports games and their yearly updates. What I neglected to mention was the fact that it was initially the FIFA games during the late 90's and early 00's that started this trend, only to be succeeded by the PES games in the mid-to-late 00's. In all honesty, the only real change in recent PES games was the pre-game menus, which admittedly were pretty awesome.

Amusingly enough, aside from the new menus that are still visually very impressive, initial impressions of PES 2010 make it feel like a radically new game. The graphics are great for a football game, especially the character models that are really well done and true to their real-life counterparts. Furthermore, the control system has been overhauled, with promises of a new 360-degree control similar to FIFA's.

However, ironically even, the moment you start to play you realize that not that much has changed from PES 2009. Despite the beautiful character models, players animate in a very unrealistic and sloppy manner, almost as if they are sliding on ice, not unlike previous versions. To make matters worse, the game speed is still much faster than FIFA's (or indeed, the tempo of a real football match) and it still is too easy to simply run past the defenders [*3]. It feels more like an arcade game rather than a simulation of football.

It doesn't end there, though. Gameplay overall feels a bit stiff, and despite the promises of true 360-degrees control, when trying to dribble you feel restricted by arbitrary, videogame-y, rules. You feel like you should be able to do a certain dribble, and yet your player decides to do something completely different to your input. And when you add the fact that there seems to be a slight lag between the input and the moment your player reacts to it, you can imagine that this can get annoying.

Despite all my complains, however, I cannot deny the fact that the demo of PES 2010 is simply fun to play. While it may not resemble the "beautiful game" [*4] as realistically as FIFA 10 does, it is still a very enjoyable videogame and realism be damned. That being said, not only does FIFA 10 feel more realistic, it's also more "fun", thanks to its responsive controls and overall smoother gameplay.

Naturally, we'll have to wait for the full versions of each game before we decide which game is better, but so far FIFA 10 has the definite advantage.

TL;DR version:

Don't pre-order PES 2010 just yet, unless your a huge fan of the series. It's hard to pass judgment yet until we see the full game, especially for the new online mode and revamped Master League, but so far it still seems to be lagging behind FIFA in terms of gameplay.

* I think I need to stop playing Rufus in SFIV. His win quotes are seriously messing up the way I speak and write. [*2]

[*2] So like, I was trying to write a post in my blog, right? Then I remembered this time when I was playing SFIV, and there was this guy that kept taunting me, you know? Why do people do that when they are losing, makes me think that people don't know why they're doing what they do, kind of like M. Night Shyamalan and his attempts at making movies. Anyway...

[*3] Ironically, a problem that plagued all the FIFA games of the early 00's.

[*4] Football is overrated.