Game reviews: Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 – Issue 69

The devil is in the detail, to coin a cliché, and that’s apparent when playing the latest iteration of Konami’s hugely successful soccer sim. First, the good stuff: PES 2008 plays, for the most part, fairly well. Character movement is fluid; there are some nice touches such as the appearance on the pitch of a referee; and there is, as ever with PES, a wide variety of ways to score a goal — always among the strongest aspects of the series.

But there’s something disappointing about PES 2008. Pro Evo has always been the connoisseur’s soccer game, the grown-up alternative to EA Sports’ flashier FIFA series. But something odd happened when FIFA 07 was released on Xbox 360. For the first time in years, it was better than PES. FIFA 08 was even better. Konami hasn’t responded to this challenge in the way its many fans would have hoped, and indeed, changes to this version of PES are very minor indeed. EA slowed the game down, made it a battle of brains as much as a battle of thumbs. Compared with the more measured and tactical build-up of FIFA, Pro Evo now appears frantic and arcade-like.

That’s a matter of taste, of course, and some may prefer the all-out footy assault of PES. But where Konami really loses out is in the smaller aspects of the game — those devilish details I mentioned at the beginning. Konami has never gone in for official licenses in the way EA does. Hence we get a team called ‘Merseyside Red’ instead of Liverpool, for example. Fair enough; save the money for something important. But Konami doesn’t seem to have spent that spare cash wisely, and PES is really starting to seem dated. Menus are basic and ugly, for example, while the commentators’ audio is weak, with Jon Champion and Mark Lawrenson reading a cursory and occasionally inaccurate script. Even something as minor as replaying goals is poorly done, and certainly not an area of the game you’d expect to suffer from frame-rate issues — yet you do.

Perhaps most damning is PES 2008’s online component. Laggy in a way you simply don’t expect these days, it’s pretty much impossible to enjoy a multiplayer game on Xbox Live.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 isn’t a bad game, but this is a once-over-lightly upgrade to the previous version. And when there’s an alternative that’s better and altogether less tired, that’s simply not good enough.

PLATFORM: Xbox 360
PLAYERS: 1-4
RATING: G
GENRE: Sports
RATING: 2.5

RICHARD BETTS