PES 2014 hands-on
By now, each and every major football league in Europe has started and soon, the Champions and Europa League matches will kick off as well. This means that fans of the most popular sport in the world are already looking for their virtual fix, and it just so happens that we got the opportunity to examine the two rivals at Gamescom. Today we’re talking about the new chapter of the historical football series by Konami: in other words, we put our hands on PES 2014, in its PS3 incarnation.
The last generation was quite unlucky for PES games and this time Konami doesn’t want to start the new one with a failure, so they decided to withhold the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One releases until next year, focusing on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC instead. The good news is that PES 2014 employs a heavily modified FOX Engine - yes, the same one used by the greatly anticipated Metal Gear Solid V. Even though PS3 and Xbox 360 are powered by old technology, the engine change still manages to impress, especially with the improved facial detail and expressions; we can only imagine how good the game will look on PC and next year, on next generation consoles.
We played a couple matches with the supervision of Steve Merrett, who explained to us some of the new features of PES 2014: first and foremost the new ball physics, finally completely detached from players’ bodies. The result is a major improvement in passing and collisions, both much more realistic this time around.
Unfortunately, even from this early and short test I could notice a few issues: the most noticeable one is perhaps the slow response of players, which seems to be a case of input lag, and shots seemed to be too slow, almost looking in slow-motion.
We also noticed unnaturally long loading times. Of course, the build was only 85% complete according to the PR, and I expect some of these problems to be eventually fixed.
Still, overall some of the improvements are great and already well implemented but on the other hand, PES 2014 might not be the edition marking the so called “Return of the King”, as many fans hoped; there’s less than one month away from the final release now though, so we’ll know soon enough.
Alessio: It’s really hard to judge a game as complex as PES from just a couple matches. I remember that in earlier WE/PES releases, the first few days of gameplay were completely dedicated to adjusting, and sometimes I instantly loved the game only to become bored with it later, or the reverse. That said, the improvements brought by the FOX Engine are easily spotted and for the first time, I can truly say that PES is finally free of the “binaries” that locked player creativity in the past. A much greater variety of actions will be available to users, and I already managed to create a couple of awesome ones in my hands-on.
However, I have to agree with Francesco: our PES 2014 hands-on definitely had some input lag and shooting shortcomings. I hope that Konami is still in time to fix those, so that we can enjoy PES 2014 to the fullest, even though clearly the true power of FOX Engine will only be unleashed by next generation hardware, hopefully next year.
The game will be available on September 20 in Europe and September 24 in North America, but everyone will be able to download a free demo on September 11, except PC users who will have to wait the game’s release date in order to get their demo, because last year some people extracted files as soon as it was released and Konami didn’t like that.