Review: Pro Evolution Soccer - PES 2012 (Xbox Live)

Score:
47%

Oh dear. It's really hard to make a wonderful game on any platform, but hitting the 'acceptable' level should be something that is easily achievable, especially if you are working on a title like Pro Evolution Soccer 2012. But Konami Digital have managed to miss it completely. If you don't want to know the result, look away now. For everyone else, just avoid this one, okay?

Author: Konami Digital

Version Reviewed: 1.0.0.0

Buy Link | Download / Information Link

PES 2012

Let's start with the control system. You have a choice of three, and none of them are totally satisfying. Probably the closest to giving you a fun game are the accelerometer controls. You tilt the smartphone for direction controls and place your thumbs on the screen, and any tap on the playing screen will perform the most appropriate action, be it pass, shoot, tackle, or switch player. It works but it's hard to focus on the game underway while moving the screen around. The second option retains this "best guess at what you want to do" tap on the screen as the action button, while the direction control replaces the tilting input with a virtual joystick on the left side of the screen.

Finally, you have the classically styled "stick and two buttons" as the third control system. While my brain thinks this should be considered the right way to control the game, my concerns here are the usual ones - there's no feedback from the virtual controls and by having to put your thumbs on the screen, so much of the game is obscured it's actually harder to play the game because you can't see what's going on.

PES 2012

None of these control systems make the game fun to play, and that's the big kicker (sic) that upsets me. There are some types of game where touch screen joypads do work well, but this is not one of them. Modern football games have a fair amount of control complexity in them, and even a dedicated device like the PS Vita, with its numerous buttons and touch pads, has to be tuned by the developers to get the most from the user inputs.

Here it feels more like a academic exercise than a practical solution to the problem of how to control the game. Pro Evolution Soccer has always been one of the more technical football games, and compared to its long time rival, FIFA, it had less of a spark to it. That's fine when you could be a very technical player, on a home console, but when you are on a small mobile deice, with limited control options, you can't have the same sort of flexibility.

PES 2012

I think this is the thing that hurts the most about PES 2012. Here was an opportunity to do something radically different, to acknowledge that sometimes a mobile platform needs a different approach and to make a football game that really worked on a smartphone. Instead it feels like the console engine of PES has been squished into Windows Phone and the developers told that they have no choice but to make it work. Which is a crying shame.

The core function of PES is damaged. There's no getting over that, so having various different ways to play a broken game actually hurts more than having a good control system and only a few ways to play a game. Put aside the various leagues, competitions, and challenges, it feels like Konami's priorities were on getting a lot of bullet points for the sales literature rather than on the people who would be buying the game.

I could rant on about the computer AI which is tuned to a very high level and as such creates a very steep learning curve; there's the lack of an update option for those who bought PES 2011 (and if you did buy it and have deleted it from your phone, don't bother looking to re-download it, because it's been pulled from the Marketplace); the long latency between control inputs and reactions on screen... but it feels like everything is just the wrong side of acceptable.

PES 2012

Hardcore PES fans who know the game inside out might get on well with the title, but I'm struggling to think where else this title would have appeal and longevity. Give the trial a go, but I suspect for most people they will want to avoid.

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