4th penalty - gameplay

Back at the turn of the millennium it was written as gospel that Pro Evolution Soccer was the bee’s knees and that FIFA could never touch it in terms of how the game was played. The EA attempts always felt a bit on the arcade side, while Konami delivered year after year of perfect feel football. Then 2008 happened and the tables began to turn. The once proud PES was brought to its knees with gameplay that felt like a second rate budget title compared to the smooth feel and intuitive movement of FIFA. The feel from both has improved this year, but it’s with the Japanese effort that we see the most difference. Unlike the mixture of button presses and stick movements required to do all the fancy stuff that EA demand, a simpler system is implemented for Pro, with all the special movements performable by just using the movement stick. Some may well say this takes a lot of the skill element away, but I’d say it makes the game a much more user friendly offering and therefore helps it to play a lot easier and in my eyes marginally better than FIFA, so it’s one clawed back for “Seabass” and his coding crew as we move on to the final shot…

PES 09  - X0X0
FIFA 09 - 000X