Kotaku’s Impressions of Konami’s Very Broken eFootball 2022

Screenshot: Konami Kotaku

You may have heard that Konami’s new soccer game eFootball 2022 is bad. I’m here today to tell you exactly why it is bad, and how bad it is.

First, a little background: Since the 1990s Konami has been making soccer games, and for much of that time they’ve been pretty good. Indeed, for much of the 2000s, the Pro Evolution Soccer series was vastly superior to its competitor FIFA, despite EA’s overwhelming advantages with things like marketing and licensing (the rights to use official names , badges and real team kits).

Over the past decade, however, this pendulum has started to swing the other way around. FIFA started improving on the pitch while only reinforcing its advantages, and by the time Ultimate Team imposed itself on a generation of kids, the writing was on the wall for Konami. With EA raising the stakes to a level Konami simply couldn’t afford to match, PES began scrambling to find a way to survive.

It first moved the series to its own internal motor, the same one used in Metal Gear Solid 5. Then he tried a name change that didn’t stick. Last year it really changed for the fences, choose to take a gap year – something almost unheard of in annual sports games outside of the disaster-prone NBA Live series – with the goal of regrouping and launching something new and fresh.

I have no idea what Konami has been up to during this time, or what game plan they hope to be successful with, as the outcome of this time, eFootball 2022, is a complete disaster. For a game to ship like this on an annual release schedule, that would have been bad enough. To release it like that, after two years and a new start, is beyond comprehension.

eFootball 2022 is all wrong with modern ideas of game delivery, and how content can be fractured and monetized, only it has been executed in the most inept ways imaginable. It takes what was once a unique, multi-faceted sports game like every other sports game, even the vile NBA 2K, and smashes it, promising to sell its components piecemeal. A career mode here, a multiplayer tournament there.

I can see the universe in which this makes sense. In which a respected football series tactfully abandons a space in which it can no longer compete, and instead tries something new where its strengths on the pitch can be enjoyed by more people for less money.

In this universe, we did not understand this. None of these other components, including the series’ revered Master League career mode, are available. They don’t even have release dates planned. The only part of the game that has made its clearly premature launch is the simplest of shells, a free downloadable front-end menu that gives players the chance to play friendly matches from a small selection of clubs, or a brief tournament. online which offers a few others.

If this brief overview had been good, then I think eFootball 2022 could have done the trick. If people could have tested the new game running on a new engine (Unreal replaced Fox) and found it to meet the series’ high standards for precise and methodical football, they might have been willing to wait the longest. big, paid content to happen.

“It’s broken and we don’t even know how to fix it” is not a promising start to your online career.Image: Konami / Kotaku

But folks, I’m here to tell you it’s no good. Online play has been so disastrous that Konami had to apologize in a pre-menu splash screen, promising future compensation. The selection of teams available for offline friendlies is disastrous, with the most hilarious example being that Konami paid Lionel Messi to appear as the leader of the game, but couldn’t afford the rights of the team for which he’s actually playing.

Where eFootball 2022 really fails is the one place it should have relied on: on the pitch. Over the past decade, even as FIFA has established itself beyond simple video games and become a mainstay of modern popular culture, you can still count on PES to play a great game of football. “The Pitch Is Ours,” as the show’s tagline was proud to say.

Not anymore! Let’s start with the biggest problem in the game: passing. Passing is the most important thing a football game needs to be successful. The whole game is built around the movement of the ball, and in this game, it sucks. It’s more than slow. It’s freezing. Occasional bullets in the back echo across the field like medicine bullets. What should be 1-2 rapids in the middle of the park by the best players in the world appear to be dismissed by octogenarians. The balls through the marauding strikers have the urgency of a donkey stuck in the mud up to the chest.

The end result is that this game about the sport of soccer does not play or look like professional soccer. No one passes like that. My eight-year-old can send a ball to a teammate faster than Bruno Fernandes can find Ronaldo. The whole illusion of what we’re doing here, any pretense that it has to simulate sports, goes out the window every time you have to skip football, literally the most frequent thing you have to do. Imagine an NBA game where the dribbling was interrupted and you see how fundamental it is.

Nothing that comes out of the game’s passing looks good either. There’s a dark heart of chaos at play here, as if every line of code has been temptingly left unfinished, every system is close to working, but never across the line to actually work. It sounds like PES, but it feels like someone was asked to describe PES from reviews and work backwards from there.

I’ve seen tackles and ball fights resolved like magic, sometimes without either player ending up with. I saw the attackers controlling the AI ​​making sharp runs across the end line, stopping and returning with the ball on the way. I have seen computer opponents dribble in front of me, then dribble straight out of bounds, without challenge.

Some of them are bugs, no doubt – this game is comically riddled with them – but others are simply proof that eFootball 2022 has been released too soon, in a state totally unfit for public consumption, let alone in as the flagship demo of a novel. new purchasing policy.

We often blame games for stumbling, but honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a series take such a step backwards, with their feet landing in a bucket, tripping Konami, and sending them down a flight of stairs. They just didn’t fail to build on last year’s game – which was really last year’s game – as much as they haphazardly hauled it to a new engine, pulling and passing. and attacking the tray like a pastry. Excluding competitor putting his muffins halfway through the oven before seeing the mixture end up on the floor.

While playing it for a week, I had to keep asking myself the same question: why? Konami’s need to change something was never questioned, but of all the possible combinations they could have chosen, what prompted them to go for a “weird modular pricing system with?” fundamentally broken football ”? Almost everything else, from a stripped-down return to the series’ roots to adherence to the cult status of the PES surely would have been preferable.

Instead, we have … this. EFootball 2022 isn’t as bad as the hyperventilating bombardment of critics would have you believe, because that kind of end product only exists in the tangled brains of online terminals. The truth, however, is that it’s not far! It’s an unnecessarily bad game in a form no one asked for, which doesn’t perform very well, and negates much of the remaining goodwill longtime fans left for this fallen star.

There’s almost nothing to do with what’s been posted so far other than complaining, and anything that could have made up for the negativity – like a Master League download – is moot because it isn’t. available for purchase or even on trial, and no one has a clue when that will happen. even be. That’s okay, since the football we’ve seen so far is so bad that I’m not interested in submitting to it more anyway.

When you die in Goldeneye, you are sent to Old Trafford eFootball 2022 Screenshot: Konami Kotaku