Okay, ‘simply’ may be something of an understatement. The overall winner of a 16-man tournament will have to see off the best Pro Evo players from across Europe, in what essentially forms the semi-finals of PES’s worldwide eSports competition (opens in new tab). The winner scores that big 20K prize, but the top four competitors will all go on to Cardiff this June to duke it out in another 16-way tourney – and the winner of that one will be declared world champ. 

Very excited to take part in the Regional Finals this week for #PESLEAGUE #PESLEAGUEUK $20k to the winner, qualifying to the WF is my aim 👊👊24 April 2017

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Collectively, the UK & Ireland has two qualifiers bidding for glory on the digital turf, with Germany, Italy and Spain also supplying two players apiece. The other territories represented are Rest Of Europe (two players), Austria & Switzerland (one), Greece (one), Netherlands (one), Nordic (one), Portugal (one) and Turkey (one).

Particularly ironic given the location of the tournament are the UK representatives’ club ties: Dex Kord (AKA DexK) and Ali Sufi (AKA bad_boy_g_2011) both follow Liverpool’s arch-rivals Manchester United. Kord is considered a strong favourite for both the Anfield competition, and the finals in Wales should he get there – he’s finished third in the world three years running.

As an aside, German contender Dennis Winkler’s club allegiance is also worth pondering: he says he supports Arsenal’s 2003/04 undefeatables and Guardiola-era Barcelona, rather than any specific individual team. 

Sergio cool as Falcao! #pesleague #RoadtoCardiff pic.twitter.com/YsVOGKMRKe17 April 2017

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Full details of the qualifiers can be found on Konami’s official PES 2017 site (opens in new tab), and all matches will be streamed (opens in new tab) on Twitch, Twitter and Facebook.

“We’re anticipating a brilliant spectacle at Anfield that brings together the very best in football and professional gaming,” says senior director Jonas Lygaard. “Following our channels is the only place to get all PES League content during the Regional Final.”

The Anfield knockout marks the final stages of the PES League Road To Cardiff, which all console players have been eligible for by playing online matches during the season. As a result, Konami has released some funky stats covering the campaign thus far, which you can see by enlarging the below image. 

Of note: there’ve been an impressive 4.99 goals a game, from 10.37 shots – meaning almost one in two chances are going in during online matches. The things Vincent Janssen would do for such a conversion rate. There’ve been more than 185 passes per game, but only 16 tackles; confirming PES once more as the purists’ choice of football game.

GamesRadar+ will be reporting behind the scenes from the PES World League finals on 3 June, where the overall winner takes home a colossal $200,000 first prize. There’s a big bag of swag on offer for the runner-up and third-place finisher, too: $100,000 and $50,000 respectively.

PES 2017 is out now on PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC.

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The post One football fan is about to win $20K for being good at PES 2017. Were definitely not jealous appeared first on Game News.

Distilling PES 2017’s anything-can-happen greatness down to a few paragraphs is a near-impossible task; the salient thing to take away is that it just plays like real football. Tactical changes matter. Matches tell stories that feel organic rather than contrived. And there’s a sense of uniqueness to every player, every team and every fixture that keeps you hooked night after night, whether it’s battling a mate in exhibition, wilfully getting lost in Master League, or pushing through the included Champions League campaigns (which come in both European and Asian flavours).

Konami has broken PES back down to the fundamentals in order to start anew, and the decision is a masterstroke. Ball control takes the biggest leap from last year, with some juddering physics replaced by wonderfully smooth and lifelike locomotion. Running full-speed at a defender remains as exhilarating as it’s ever been, but patiently stepping through a congested midfield while using deliberate, balletic weight shifts to shield the ball is equally pleasurable. Often more so. 

Supplement that improved control with near-effortless passing, and shooting that really does snap – oh, and the most intelligent off-the-ball runs you’ve ever seen in a video game – and you have a sim that truly understands, and accurately imitates, actual football.

The Japanese dev is also clearly aware of criticisms levelled at last year’s effort, and in many areas has done its utmost to fix them. Keepers aren’t perfect, but much improved, to the point that their ability to claim nigh-on every low cross through the six-yard box occasionally grates. You see more fouls, but refs are fairly lenient when it comes to brandishing cards, which makes for a decent balance. (Although the lack of a yellow card icon above a booked player’s head makes it tough to track who’s on a last warning, an oversight that’s cost me some soft red cards.) 

As for the adaptive AI that Konami has repeatedly pushed as a new feature: I’ve been playing non-stop for a fortnight and not registered anything noticeable in this regard. But one reason for that is the AI varies up its tactics smartly by default.

Play on higher difficulty settings and you really get to experience the difference in opposition approaches, and are forced to adjust accordingly. On ‘Super Star’ (six stars), Barcelona’s relentless, short back-and-forth passing makes just regaining possession an achievement, while Madrid’s superhuman width puts huge strain on your wingers and full-backs. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, English second division sides love a diagonal ball in behind, or cloud-bothering punt towards a target man. No danger of Rotherham mimicking Real here. 

And the AI isn’t afraid to do mad stuff you’d usually expect from human opponents: dangerous passes from keeper to full back with your striker looming, crosses from near the halfway line, absurdly ambitious pings from distance. In one game as Real Madrid – AKA ‘MD White’ – against Barca, my keeper, Keylor Navas, fisted a corner away towards an unmarked, computer-controlled Jordi Alba 25 yards from goal. “I’d wallop that,” I thought, knowing there was no chance my opponent’s robot-brain would take such a low-percentage option. Except Alba did wallop it, into the bottom corner. My follow-up thought is unprintable.

As should be the case, things get even more difficult – and complex – when international teams are involved. For GR+’s video review, I wanted to get a clip of Neymar scoring for Brazil and whipping his top off in celebration (one of PES 2017’s more unconventional new features). Even on four-star difficulty, this required a multitude of different opponents and formations to achieve. 

Where in recent football games there’s been little means of stopping human-controlled Neymar and Messi and Ronaldo, this year’s PES is no fool from a defensive standpoint. The German pairing of Hummels and Boateng practically swallows Neymar whole, putting in challenges as soon as he wins the ball. France are more patient, but the security blanket of N’Golo Kante at DMF stops me dropping deep to gain possession and shooting from range. And Pepe, of Portugal, is like that German pair rolled into one, unbalancing me with a challenge on almost every shot. I eventually get the clip, but the planned tactic of ‘give it to the best player and let him do an easy goal’ isn’t one that has much joy against PES 2017’s AI. Here’s hoping that’s the case for online matches, too. (With servers being prepared for launch day, there’s been no way to test them pre-release.)

Like in previous PESes, tactical options abound. Using myriad formations and other, deeper strategies – such as being able to instruct full-backs to overlap mid-match – is all part of the glorious learning curve. Just as promised, reality-emulating systems such as tiki-taka and gegenpressing are included, and your players respond accordingly, but these systems are initially hard to find. You need to disable Simple tactics, and head into Advanced Instructions, where you can assign a variety of attacking options (like tiki-taka or false no.9) to up and down on the d-pad, and defensive options (like gegenpressing or swarm the box) to left and right on the d-pad to activate mid-game.

Used in tandem with the preset tactics, these options allow you to more closely mirror Barca’s default attacking style (‘possession game’) and build-up (‘short pass’) than in PES 2016 if you want to play that way as, say, Bournemouth (East Dorsetshire). Slightly confusing if you’ve limited real-life tactical knowledge, but ultimately the feature does work as intended.

However, the setting you need more than any other – sadly – pertains to sound. Specifically: muting the commentary. Compared to the booth advances made in other sports games, such as Madden’s weekly updates, Peter Drury and Jim Beglin are straight out of the analogue era.

Drury’s anodyne play-by-play over-uses phrases he would never say in real life – “knocks it towards the front” – while Beglin regularly lurches from hyperbolic to insomnia-triggering and back again. A two-yard tap-in that’s “nothing short of a cold-blooded execution”? Okay, mate. However FIFA plays this season, the minimal guarantee is that you’ll get top-flight presentation. PES 2017, in this regard, feels National League.

Thankfully the same isn’t true of its menus, which have undergone a long-overdue spring clean. Goodbye, bonkers  ‘establishing communications’ start-up message. Large, clear panels direct you around faultlessly, whether it’s to exhibition matches (online or off), longer-term modes (in addition to those mentioned at this review’s outset, there’s MyClub – but that wasn’t available for use before completing this review), or the game’s typically comprehensive editing suite. Arsenal and Liverpool are the only real English sides this year, while Spain is limited to Barca and Atletico, so that mode is a critical inclusion. Although the returning option to import kits, badges and so on means you can (and in my case, will) let someone else do the hard work. 

The revised menus serve to make Master League unmissable for the first time in years. While you can choose real players now should you so wish, Master League’s magic was always in taking fictional players and making them great, and a few smart tweaks again facilitate that. Budgets for fees and wages are clearly set, and there’s a nice risk-reward feel to every incoming transfer – push too far in trying to bring the price down and the deal is instantly rendered dead. New player roles include ‘hero’ and ‘bad boy’, and being able to see the in-game likeness of any transfer target, rather than a photo, is a simple-yet-exceptional piece of design. So if you only want to sign players with proper faces, now you can. Amazing.

I deliberately tried not to pop the A-word too early, because it’s both a cliche and has been applied prematurely to so many sports games over recent years. Yet there seems little danger of it needing to be retracted this time around. In terms of on-pitch play, PES is so authentic and varied that it should keep you going for the duration of this season, and beyond. It’s the game lapsed PS2-era fans such as myself have spent nine years dreaming of – one that will, at long last, have you dropping to your knees at 2am in celebration, rather than prayer.

PES 2017 was reviewed on PS4.

The Verdict

4.5

4.5 out of 5

PES 2017

A long-overdue return to form that finally surpasses Pro Evo’s PS2 glory days – and, assuming presentation woes are fixed, lays the foundations for an all-new footballing empire.

The post PES 2017 review: “The game lapsed PS2-era fans have been dreaming of” appeared first on Game News.

Distilling PES 2017’s anything-can-happen greatness down to a few paragraphs is a near-impossible task; the salient thing to take away is that it just plays like real football. Tactical changes matter. Matches tell stories that feel organic rather than contrived. And there’s a sense of uniqueness to every player, every team and every fixture that keeps you hooked night after night, whether it’s battling a mate in exhibition, wilfully getting lost in Master League, or pushing through the included Champions League campaigns (which come in both European and Asian flavours).

Konami has broken PES back down to the fundamentals in order to start anew, and the decision is a masterstroke. Ball control takes the biggest leap from last year, with some juddering physics replaced by wonderfully smooth and lifelike locomotion. Running full-speed at a defender remains as exhilarating as it’s ever been, but patiently stepping through a congested midfield while using deliberate, balletic weight shifts to shield the ball is equally pleasurable. Often more so. 

Supplement that improved control with near-effortless passing, and shooting that really does snap – oh, and the most intelligent off-the-ball runs you’ve ever seen in a video game – and you have a sim that truly understands, and accurately imitates, actual football.

The Japanese dev is also clearly aware of criticisms levelled at last year’s effort, and in many areas has done its utmost to fix them. Keepers aren’t perfect, but much improved, to the point that their ability to claim nigh-on every low cross through the six-yard box occasionally grates. You see more fouls, but refs are fairly lenient when it comes to brandishing cards, which makes for a decent balance. (Although the lack of a yellow card icon above a booked player’s head makes it tough to track who’s on a last warning, an oversight that’s cost me some soft red cards.) 

As for the adaptive AI that Konami has repeatedly pushed as a new feature: I’ve been playing non-stop for a fortnight and not registered anything noticeable in this regard. But one reason for that is the AI varies up its tactics smartly by default.

Play on higher difficulty settings and you really get to experience the difference in opposition approaches, and are forced to adjust accordingly. On ‘Super Star’ (six stars), Barcelona’s relentless, short back-and-forth passing makes just regaining possession an achievement, while Madrid’s superhuman width puts huge strain on your wingers and full-backs. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, English second division sides love a diagonal ball in behind, or cloud-bothering punt towards a target man. No danger of Rotherham mimicking Real here. 

And the AI isn’t afraid to do mad stuff you’d usually expect from human opponents: dangerous passes from keeper to full back with your striker looming, crosses from near the halfway line, absurdly ambitious pings from distance. In one game as Real Madrid – AKA ‘MD White’ – against Barca, my keeper, Keylor Navas, fisted a corner away towards an unmarked, computer-controlled Jordi Alba 25 yards from goal. “I’d wallop that,” I thought, knowing there was no chance my opponent’s robot-brain would take such a low-percentage option. Except Alba did wallop it, into the bottom corner. My follow-up thought is unprintable.

As should be the case, things get even more difficult – and complex – when international teams are involved. For GR+’s video review, I wanted to get a clip of Neymar scoring for Brazil and whipping his top off in celebration (one of PES 2017’s more unconventional new features). Even on four-star difficulty, this required a multitude of different opponents and formations to achieve. 

Where in recent football games there’s been little means of stopping human-controlled Neymar and Messi and Ronaldo, this year’s PES is no fool from a defensive standpoint. The German pairing of Hummels and Boateng practically swallows Neymar whole, putting in challenges as soon as he wins the ball. France are more patient, but the security blanket of N’Golo Kante at DMF stops me dropping deep to gain possession and shooting from range. And Pepe, of Portugal, is like that German pair rolled into one, unbalancing me with a challenge on almost every shot. I eventually get the clip, but the planned tactic of ‘give it to the best player and let him do an easy goal’ isn’t one that has much joy against PES 2017’s AI. Here’s hoping that’s the case for online matches, too. (With servers being prepared for launch day, there’s been no way to test them pre-release.)

Like in previous PESes, tactical options abound. Using myriad formations and other, deeper strategies – such as being able to instruct full-backs to overlap mid-match – is all part of the glorious learning curve. Just as promised, reality-emulating systems such as tiki-taka and gegenpressing are included, and your players respond accordingly, but these systems are initially hard to find. You need to disable Simple tactics, and head into Advanced Instructions, where you can assign a variety of attacking options (like tiki-taka or false no.9) to up and down on the d-pad, and defensive options (like gegenpressing or swarm the box) to left and right on the d-pad to activate mid-game.

Used in tandem with the preset tactics, these options allow you to more closely mirror Barca’s default attacking style (‘possession game’) and build-up (‘short pass’) than in PES 2016 if you want to play that way as, say, Bournemouth (East Dorsetshire). Slightly confusing if you’ve limited real-life tactical knowledge, but ultimately the feature does work as intended.

However, the setting you need more than any other – sadly – pertains to sound. Specifically: muting the commentary. Compared to the booth advances made in other sports games, such as Madden’s weekly updates, Peter Drury and Jim Beglin are straight out of the analogue era.

Drury’s anodyne play-by-play over-uses phrases he would never say in real life – “knocks it towards the front” – while Beglin regularly lurches from hyperbolic to insomnia-triggering and back again. A two-yard tap-in that’s “nothing short of a cold-blooded execution”? Okay, mate. However FIFA plays this season, the minimal guarantee is that you’ll get top-flight presentation. PES 2017, in this regard, feels National League.

Thankfully the same isn’t true of its menus, which have undergone a long-overdue spring clean. Goodbye, bonkers  ‘establishing communications’ start-up message. Large, clear panels direct you around faultlessly, whether it’s to exhibition matches (online or off), longer-term modes (in addition to those mentioned at this review’s outset, there’s MyClub – but that wasn’t available for use before completing this review), or the game’s typically comprehensive editing suite. Arsenal and Liverpool are the only real English sides this year, while Spain is limited to Barca and Atletico, so that mode is a critical inclusion. Although the returning option to import kits, badges and so on means you can (and in my case, will) let someone else do the hard work. 

The revised menus serve to make Master League unmissable for the first time in years. While you can choose real players now should you so wish, Master League’s magic was always in taking fictional players and making them great, and a few smart tweaks again facilitate that. Budgets for fees and wages are clearly set, and there’s a nice risk-reward feel to every incoming transfer – push too far in trying to bring the price down and the deal is instantly rendered dead. New player roles include ‘hero’ and ‘bad boy’, and being able to see the in-game likeness of any transfer target, rather than a photo, is a simple-yet-exceptional piece of design. So if you only want to sign players with proper faces, now you can. Amazing.

I deliberately tried not to pop the A-word too early, because it’s both a cliche and has been applied prematurely to so many sports games over recent years. Yet there seems little danger of it needing to be retracted this time around. In terms of on-pitch play, PES is so authentic and varied that it should keep you going for the duration of this season, and beyond. It’s the game lapsed PS2-era fans such as myself have spent nine years dreaming of – one that will, at long last, have you dropping to your knees at 2am in celebration, rather than prayer.

PES 2017 was reviewed on PS4.

The Verdict

4.5

4.5 out of 5

PES 2017

A long-overdue return to form that finally surpasses Pro Evo’s PS2 glory days – and, assuming presentation woes are fixed, lays the foundations for an all-new footballing empire.

The post PES 2017 review: “The game lapsed PS2-era fans have been dreaming of” appeared first on Game News.