Recent reviews by Flanelman

good

so good

The modularity of buildings and grid-less placement has ruined every other city builder for me. The management might not be as in depth as other games but you can get so creative with the layout and look of your villages/cities. Great mod support too.

got gud

They took a game that was mostly played by single player gamers and removed all the single player modes to compete with Fifa in online modes even though their online modes are miles behind Fifa. Genuinley have no idea what they were thinking.

Also, their menus are straight out of 1999.

Fun and free

Good story and fun gameplay, it's just a shame you can't choose your weapons other than the like 3 weapons on each level. There was no levels that let you use a wingman which was a bit dissapointing.

Used to be so good, they have no idea what they're doing with ranked/balancing and they force gimmicky modes into pubs because no one plays them otherwise.. maybe take the hint?

Like Battlefield but it's 16v16 or 8v8, low poly graphics and no vehicles. It's a really fun game, I'm amazed it's free honestly.

E2: If you don't mind graphics as much, get PES 2018, if you do, get PES 2019. Don't get this.

E: The AI still isn't fixed as of 8th of October 2019, they leave balls that are going riight too them, or they'll run towards it and just run passed it.. it's ridiculous. I stopped playing for about 3 weeks hoping it would be patched but apparently this is just the AI? it's shocking.

Original:

I'll preface this by saying I play exclusivley offline.

The game has some really good ideas that honestly just seem to not quite be executed as well as they could be. The new camera? Looks awesome 90% of the time, but when the stats drop below the scoreline (passes made, touches etc) and the opposition player is 100% covered by it, or the radar at the bottom, it gets very hard to do anything, this isn't that often tho and you can change the camera so this isn't a big deal.

The friendly AI is honestly quite bad, the amount of times per game that you'll make a simple pass (a 5m short pass for example) and the receiving player will just not even bother to react or take a touch till after the ball is passed him and the chance has gone? INFURIATING because it happens multiple times per game, atleast from my experience. This even happened to my keeper last night and lost me the game because of an OG. Back heels are very inconsistant too, your player can have the trait and try to attempt a pass directly behind them, they'll do a full 180 spin and try and pass which 9/10 goes nowhere near your player or is hit way too hard despite you tapping the pass button instead of backheeling it, it's got to the point where I actually try avoid backheels which I used A LOT in past PES games. The game aims for a slower pace and most the time it feels really good, but sometimes it feels sluggish rather than slow.

There's also a weird thing that I've noticed that if you sprint when you take your first touch an awful lot of the time the ball will just ping right up into the air at shoulder height, Messi, Neymar, Ronaldo, doesn't matter, apparently no one can control the ball on the run.

Now onto my biggest complaint, the dribbling changes, these make 0 sense to me at all and make it feel much worse. 2019 and the previous titles had such an intuitive dribbling system imo but now with the changes it feels average. why split skills up with some having to use r1 and some not, and having what r1 did now just on the analog stick? So you can't ready a skill as the defender approaches anymore as it makes you do a tight dribble, and it feels weird having to move using both analog sticks depending on what dribble style you want to do, r1+left stick was fine, right stick feels awful. That and now you need to press r1 + r2 to face goal, which if you're in a tight spot and have to do is so much slower than the one press where you didn't have to move your hand. They added nothing to the skills system, but changed the controls to something far far worse than what they were imo. These changes genuinley pissed me off because they're (imo) so bad and most importantly unnecessary

Idk, the games good, and if you're someone who will play it a lot I'd say get it but if you don't I'd save your money because it's not THAT good compared to the others. Main improvement is visually, the gameplay has improved in some places and got drastically worse in others.

I'd probably give it a 6.5/10. I'd give it a maybe if I could, it's fun, but it's nowhere near $75nzd fun and the frustrating parts are so prevelant in this years edition that I'm just gonna leave it as a no, if they fix the AI and/or the dribbling, it would be a yes 100%.