The Demo Allows Players To Experience The Game

By Author: Guild Black
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For years, the Pro Evolution Soccer PES series was the forerunner of the soccer genre, with a blend of realistic soccer and some addictive gameplay modes. The FIFA series, meanwhile, attracted gamers with a wide variety of licensed players and teams, even if the soccer itself could be seen as subpar compared to PES. However, with the advent of the most recent console generation, EA Sports upped its game, and in the past few years, FIFA has been seen as the undisputed king of soccer, with a drastically improved match engine, and outstanding critical and commercial success due to such. PES has been playing catch-up, and even though it maintains a solid core of fans, the series is certainly seen each year as playing second fiddle to EA Sport's juggernaut.

The upcoming iteration of the PES series, Pro Evolution Soccer 2013, will be released on September 15 and has recently had a demo released for Xbox 360 and PC. I sat down with it to see if it takes any significant strides forward in an attempt to catch FIFA. While soccer games traditionally don't receive as much of an overhaul as regular sequels between each entry, they ...
... do gain gradual tweaks to the gameplay in an attempt to fine tune the experience. This year, PES is pushing its 'Player ID' and 'Full Control' additions, which certainly make some difference to the way the game is played, but perhaps not in the revolutionary manner that some players hope for.

The demo allows players to experience the game as eight different teams: four international England, Portugal, Italy and Germany and four from the Copa Santander Libertadores, South America's version of Europe's Champion's League competition. Strangely, though, despite the competition including the whole of South America, the four teams on offer Santos FC, Fluminense, Internacional and Flamengo are all based in Brazil. Still, the opportunity to play as soccer heavyweights such as Neymar, Ronaldinho and Deco isn`t something to turn your nose up at.

The presentation of PES is certainly impressive, although the menu screens suffer from an annoying blend of background music, which seems to consist mainly of trip-hop. After a while, you'll most likely have a headache, but if recent PES entries are followed, there will be an option to replace the default music with a playlist of your own. I would heavily recommend this, if not for the sake of your sanity, then for the sake of those in the room with you. Once you get into playing matches though, the visuals for some of the players are close to a standard that will take your breath away. Players such as John Terry and Ronaldinho look particularly impressive, and you'll surely recognise the running style and pre-free kick stance of Cristiano Ronaldo if you watched any of this summer's Euro 2012 competition.

One of the main weaknesses with the Pro Evo series has often been the commentary, which is usually significantly weaker and sounds more forced than FIFA's offering, which aims for and sounds like what you'd hear watching soccer on TV. The demo doesn't actually include any commentary, so I was unable to judge if this year's efforts were an improvement, although I wouldn't hold out too much hope that it would be. The other trump card that FIFA often holds over PES is that FIFA is almost fully licensed in terms of players and teams, whilst PES is typically more intermittent in what is and isn't licensed. This holds true in the demo, with most of the www.eacoins.co.uk teams, players and kits up to date, but the stadia, despite looking like their real-world counterparts, suffer from made-up names.