Pro Evolution Soccer 2016, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

With the game now having been out for a few months, I think worth putting my thoughts down somewhere about it properly, with enough time that the hype for a new game as died down, and long enough that the anger from awful release has died down.

For simplicity, I'll approach this in 3 sections: the Good parts of the game, the working parts that could be improved, and the parts that are just flat-out bad and need to be rebuilt. For the sake of comparison, I will at times refer to the game's competitor, FIFA 16, but only when needed. This is written from an offline-only perspective.

Let's start with the Good, for positivity and all that:

- Fluidity of gameplay: The players move nicely, the passing feels nice, the ball control feels nice, the game in general works very well in this regard, and it's arguably its biggest strength.

- Collision Engine: This would be good for something that has been used for years, but as a first since they implemented it, it has worked beautifully. There's the occasional odd-looking moment if you go into the replay, but for the most part, it looks natural and adds a weight that was missing from the last game in the series.

- Real Player faces: Absolutely outstanding, and they have an amazing selection of players. Some of the older ones still in use (i.e. some Barcelona players) are looking a bit dated compared to the more recent ones, but overall they look amazing, and put FIFA to shame, particularly in scope of players.

FIFA has players like Tom Ince and Jason Shackell with real faces, but players like Martial, Depay, Berardi, Kovacic, and numerous others still have generic faces. In particular, having many real player faces for up-and-coming stars helps extend the longevity of the Master League experience.

- Master League Presentation: Something I didn't expect, but ultimately worked out really quite well. I, in particular, like that media items actually generate with pictures from the last match, pictures of the players in the kit, and such. With the number of amazing player faces in the game, this in particular looks brilliant for top teams.

- The Keepers: This is something that will be controversial. The keepers in PES 2016 are actually quite well balanced, though; they move like a person, not the shotgun supermen of FIFA. This gives the game more realism around the goal, and unlike in FIFA, they're actual players, not band-aids for poor AI and design.

Like real keepers, they can have a poor game, or have an amazing one, and they rarely have the complete brain explosion you'd see in FIFA. They also save what they should (weak long-range efforts), but don't save what they shouldn't (a forward given the whole goal to aim at from the penalty spot under no pressure).

There are odd things here and there that they could improve with, but they generally are good and add to the variance and realism of the goals you can get in-game.

- Player Development: Works well at this time, players develop quite naturally, the breakthroughs work well, and are an interesting squad dilemma; the game overall works really nicely in this regard. This, of course, builds into...

- Squad roles: They are an interesting concept and quite well implemented. The way they allow older, more experienced players to retain value, even in their decline, is quite an interesting approach, and it adds an interesting dynamic to squad creation and selection. Sadly, that is backed up by the other long-term systems in Master League, as discussed below.

Works, but needs work

- Shooting: The shooting still tends to be a bit too accurate at times, even for not particularly great players. It appears part of the issue people blame keepers for is that shooting is a bit too accurate, and whilst you'd generally not expect actual keepers to save those shots (you might expect FIFA shotgun keepers, boy are those animations odd), if too many goals start going in, and PES 2016 can and does have a few blowouts.

Generally, people start blaming the keeper, not the fact that Johnny McStrikerface has had 4 half-chances and just slid that ball smoothly into the postage stamp on each occasion. It looks nice, but it needs some balancing in the future.

- Balance to player reactions: Players have a tendency to stumble and become a bit unresponsive; this isn't such a bad thing on its own, though. Their stumbling and being incapable of just firing off in a different direction instantly isn't a bad thing; their being completely uncontrollable during it, arguably, is.

It adds an interesting balance, but there needs to be a way to get the player to do something while this is happening, even a desperate, falling, flailing of the boot at the ball. Adding such desperation elements could change the way defending works in future versions, and, importantly, the risk of fouls from this could also help improve the realism in this regard.

- Celebrations: Looks tacked on, looks outright bizarre at times. Not the most important feature, but it just comes across as something they implemented late in development because they were told to. Needs more variation and better alignment between the pitch and the silly cutscenes.

- The difficulty: The difficulty of the game saturates far too quickly, and it becomes too easy to demolish the AI at higher levels. The difference between Top Player and Superstar can be very minor, and as previously mentioned, blowouts can and do happen at even the greatest difficulties.

Whilst many players won't have difficulty with this, for those who want to play offline and find the AI a bit too easy, it would be nice to see another difficulty level added in the future.

- Option files: Something needs to be done in this regard in the future. What I don't get is, if we can have image importing, why can't we have a system that reads instructions for the game to do it all automatically from a notepad file or something?

Maybe release a utility for the PC version prior to release to allow that editing to be done ahead of time for PC and PS4 (and ideally the Xbone if it's possible in the future), and have that file basically be instructions for what the game puts where, what colours, construct faces and players, etc.

That would get around the issue of not being able to share the files themselves, and we already know Sony is at least okay with them importing files.

The Bad

- The AI fouls: Whilst they do foul the player more since more recent patches, they still don't at reasonable levels, and they almost never concede a penalty. The AI should give away fouls at some point; they shouldn't be perfect all the time.

The odd thing is that in "rival games," they tend to try to break your legs, and you do see more yellows and the occasional red, but still almost never penalties. Some have blamed the foul system itself, but it generally works quite well, particularly between people.

- Master League Transfers: I like the concept of what they've done with the negotiations, I like the ideas behind it, but the actual decisions on how much players go for, who wants them, etc., is, to be blunt about it, completely and unforgivably awful. I don't know another way of putting it.

Players' value seems to be set almost entirely on overall, meaning a young superstar is valued about the same as a 35-year-old journeyman of the same age.

If I've got the choice between a 75-rated 17-year-old Odegaard and a 75-rated 37-year-old, you'd be crazy to pick the 37-year-old. What's more, the values for all players are just out of whack; the whole financial model needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.

- AI squad building: The above, of course, links into this, but it's worth saying that having built a superteam thanks to the awful transfer system, you're now facing the all-powerful Real Madrid, with two 74-rated center-backs because they sold all their good ones and never thought to replace them with the 40p they received for them. Adding to that...

- The contract negotiations: Why does pretty much every player start with less than a year on their contract? The system in place is annoying at best, but this just comes across as bizarre. I don't mind the concept, but the implementation of this just needs to be rebuilt.

- The regens: Some people like them, some people don't, but the simple point is we need options and a more fluid way of them appearing. Right now, you can potentially see a 90+ rated Totti within 5 years, and they tend to blow the real youngsters out of the water very quickly.

There tend to be 4-5+ 75+ rated 16-year-olds after the first 1 or 2 regen productions. At the very least, I'd hope for some rebalancing in the future, as well as the option for randomly generated names, faces, and such for those who want them.

- The commentary: Awful, just completely and totally awful. I have no other way to describe it. Thankfully, you can mute that rubbish, though.

- Replay angles: Yes, game, I enjoy watching the post while the ball is meant to be powering past a different part of the goal.

I've probably missed something, but that's just my thoughts on the game after this time. If you want to add more, please fill in the comment area.