Summary
You can forget about FIFA
The Good
I still have fresh memories from this game, for I played it yesterday with a friend form 9:00 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. One thing need to be said: this is the best football simulation around.
First of all, the animations are superb. The graphics are great in general, but hardly much better than those of "FIFA 2002". But the way the players are animated makes you forget FIFA. The players run smoothly, they kick the ball just a real player would do it, jump over it, fall down, etc. - everything is absolutely realistic. The amount of detail and the exact programming in this game is amazing. The ball's behavior is stunningly similar to reality, and so is the behavior of the players. The game makes full use of psychological issues: a team with character would play especially agressively in the last minutes, the players would lack concentration after having made a mistake, they could get angry and make errors, etc.
Some things are much better executed than in FIFA games. For example, if a player turns around abruptly, he does it in a very realistic way: the proccess of stopping and turning takes some time. In FIFA games, however, the players would just turn around smoothly, which is not the way it happens in reality.
The statistics have really a great influence on the game, and the customization of your own players exceeds by far everything achieved by FIFA. Not only you have a vaster choice of different faces, haircuts, and what not: you have loads of stats to change, and each one of them is extremely important. There are some very advanced stats, such as "mentality" or agressivity", or "team spirit", but believe me, it makes a difference having a player with team spirit 1 or 99 in your team!
The variety of movements is simply beyond belief. There are no standard goals here: each shot at the goal is entirely personal. In FIFA games, those were mainly the arcade elements which made them much less realistic than this one. For example, you could shout there from an impossible angle and score, you could tackle a player from behind and always get the same reaction from the referee (while in Pro Evolution Soccer the referees can make mistakes, and it is clearly visible). There were much less casualties shown in FIFA games, which are so common in football: players lose concentration, make silly mistakes, slip on the ground, make a bad pass, etc. Most important was the shot at the goal. In FIFA games, one-on-one with the goaltender always resulted in a goal. Here, you should shoot the ball correctly and accurately, and at the right time. If you don't, you will never score. If you choose a bad angle, the ball will go near the goal. If you shoot too softly, the goaltender will stop the ball. If you shoot too powerfully, the ball will fly to the sky.
Some especially annoying situations in FIFA games are absent here. I refer mostly to the easiness of an attack and of scoring. In FIFA, you could easily have a 10-minute game ending with 6:6 at the second difficulty level. Here, there's almost no chance such a thing will happen. What annoyed me a lot in FIFA is that your best strategy was always passing through the middle of the field, in a direct line, towards the forward who was standing with his back to the goal. The forward would get the ball, turn around - and it's a goal. This was the most common system of scoring in FIFA games. And it always looked the same. In "Pro Evolution Soccer", you should really try to place your players correctly, and there's much more individual qualities required to score, such as dribbling, strength, precision, etc. Same can be said about the opponents' attacks, which would also work very directly. Either one of the opponent players would suddenly become unstoppable and rush right through the middle of the field to score, or the opponent player would score a goal with the head after a corner. In this game, it is no longer so. If you play well - and this is anything but easy! - you can stop most of the attacks, but even if you play extremely well, the game would never end ith such ridiculous score as 12:0 at the second level, as I experienced it often in FIFA games.
The Bad
However... the game is still not perfect. Some of the things which should be changed are:
1) The number of the participating countries. It is too small, unlike in FIFA games, where you could choose almost any nation possible. I'm Israeli, and my friend comes from Uzbekistan, but both those countries are not available in "Pro Evolution Soccer". What a shame :(
2) Some teams are WAY too strong. Germany is pretty invincible at fourth level. France is also extremely strong. Come on, guys! This is not realistic. Jancker, Ziege, and other rather mediocre German players play like gods in this game!
3) The game has a strange way of executing random battles. Usually, the stronger team should win, at least after several attempts. But my friend and I, playing with two teams in a World Cup mode, got Marocco and Iran in semifinals for two times in a row! How on earth could they get there, wiping away Brazil and other much stronger teams? We both won 7:0 and 5:0, respectively, and that could only mean that those teams were really weak. And my friend had to face Jamaica in the finals... And it's not that they made Jamaica strong, on the contrary, it is an extremely weak team in the game, so how could it reach the finals? Very strange.
4) The game has a very nasty habit of throwing you out of the championship mode, saying "good night" to you and living you with no options but to turn the console off just when you were about to face the opponent in the finals.
The Bottom Line
Although it is not perfect, it is still the best football simulation available. Anyone interested in football should grab it without thinking.
