![]() If I want to play online I can, if I want to play offline but keep making progress, I can do that too. Winning matches, earning points, upgrading my squad and eFootball does that in a refreshingly minimalistic way. But like I said before, I spent years just playing Master League and just doing this. All you get are a couple of ways to play. There’s no Master League, no cups, no anything. But before long, I’d earned more points, bought better players and developed the ones I had using the game’s experience system (which lets you train up players and enhance their various statistics) and then I was handing out some beatings of my own and all without spending a penny on the game. I went online and promptly got beaten by some prick with a team full of galacticos (mainly built from Liverpool players which made me hate the a bit more). Unlike FIFA, the game was pretty generous with rewards for logging on, taking part in events, watching videos and so on and so, before long, I’d put together a half-decent side of affordable players. Here you’d start with a basic squad and you’d win matches (against the AI or an online opponent) and earn GP (one of eFootball‘s currency systems) and buy new players. While still lacking in all the modes you’d normally get in a football game, what it did have was the Dream Team mode. ![]() After that the series came in and out of my gaming life, mainly thanks to the occasional review copy, but, as with FIFA, they were trying to cram too much into it and after two decades of incremental updates (for both series), I had kind of lost interest in ever playing a football game for fun.īut then I fired up eFootball 2020. Winning games, building up your team and putting together your dream squad was interesting enough to me to keep me hooked all the way up to PES 5. On a personal level, all my happy memories of the old ISS/PES games were tied to Master League, the mode that saw you struggle with a piss-poor team full of famous old names like Vorlander and Minanda before earning enough points to buy better players. We never liked either of those and combined with some dodgy controls, laggy gameplay and rough graphics, it looked like our interest in Konami’s footballing efforts were done forever. Everything was gone except for a new take on M圜lub which was PES‘s answer to FIFA‘s Ultimate Team mode. The career modes, the couch multiplayer, the leagues and cups. The problem was that the game had gone free-to-play and in that process, everything was stripped out of the game. Indeed, we fired it up, said ‘what the fuck is this shit?’ and uninstalled it almost immediately. ![]() While EA continued to churn out FIFA games, all of which hit the top of the gaming charts and stay their for ages, Konami seemingly gave up on PES in 2019 when they released eFootball, a game that was hamstrung by a clunky, unfamiliar name that had now dropped the PES from the title, but also a fairly disastrous launch. Indeed, a chap from EA told us four or five years ago that PES hasn’t even been a blip on their radar for a decade. They’re not just seen as the better simulation but they’ve pretty much had the genre sewn up for a decade. Where ISS was seen as the simulation and FIFA was the more arcade-y game back on PS1 and PS2 ( PES4 also is one of the best football games ever made) these days EA have kind of had things their own way for a while with the FIFA games. Since those halcyon days on the PS1, EA and Konami’s fortunes have shifted somewhat, as have their flagship footie titles. ![]() To this day, ISS Pro Evolution Soccer remains one of the best football games ever made. We didn’t like either but the point kind of works for FIFA and PES. You can like both, but you like one more than the other. In a deleted scene in Pulp Fiction, Mia Wallace says that there are two types of people: Beatles fans and Elvis fans. Augin PS5 / Reviews tagged efootball / football / iss / pes by Richie
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