As a Tottenham Hotspur fan, seeing Arsenal in the game while my team has been dubbed North East London sticks in my craw. Presentation-wise, Konami has at least improved the franchise’s notoriously awful menus for PES 2019, but the patchiness of the licensing continues to frustrate. Become a Legend mode, which lets you pursue a career as an individual player, is more or less unchanged from PES 2018 – which is a travesty, since it feels hopelessly flat and lacking in excitement compared to FIFA’s story-led equivalent, The Journey. The commentary, from Peter Drury and Jim Beglin, is an unmitigated disaster, ameliorated only by the fact that you can’t hear it unless you turn the crowd noise down.Īnd there are aspects of PES 2019 that give the impression that they are only there because FIFA has them. Master League mode, which casts you as the manager of a club, wisely keeps the management aspect light while focusing on the actual football, but is marred by stilted, fatuous communications from AI-controlled club officials.

It is less overtly rapacious than FUT in its desire to rinse you of real-world cash, but otherwise, it’s inferior in every respect. Its online team-building mode m圜lub – the equivalent of FIFA’s all-conquering FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) – has at least adopted a more conventional player-card system, but its various agent and scouting systems remain impenetrable. Off the pitch, especially in comparison with the super-glossy FIFA 2018, PES 2019 feels at best amateurish and often downright shambolic. Putting them all together in matches is deeply satisfying. Its excellent training mode takes you through every aspect of the control system, teaching you how to time through-balls to find your striker’s run, delicately chip goalkeepers rushing out to close you down and leave canny defenders in your wake with an arsenal of close-control moves.

Where it was once it was routinely locked in an annual battle for football-game supremacy with EA Sports’ FIFA, the latter’s much more expansive budget (and official Premier League licence) have made it the Manchester City of sports games, while PES has been demoted to the game of choice for non-conformists and football purists.īut there is one area in which PES 2019 clearly has the edge on FIFA: on the pitch, PES 2019 is unassailable – deliciously silky passing and animations let you play football as it is played in real-life, rather than some barely recognisable, slightly manic, end-to-end approximation of the beautiful game.

P ro Evolution Soccer (universally known as PES) has come to resemble Blackburn Rovers or Coventry: a once-great team that fell upon hard times as a result of off-field woes.

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