There are still serious issues with Pro Evo’s presentation and finery, and they’re in areas that FIFA has always and continues to excel. Just because it’s less of a concern, though, doesn’t mean it’s no longer a concern.
All PES had to do was make its actual football so good that the rest of the game’s junk became less of a concern. I thought the only thing that would help Konami’s game improve was a better suite of licenses, or an abandonment of the publisher’s insane fascination with menus and network connectivity messages. It’s funny, last year I lamented that as good as PES was getting on the field, it’s off-field woes were keeping it from pulling ahead as the better overall package. In PES 2016, on the other hand, there’s such perfect sense of heft to the passing system and the collisions between attacker and defender that it’s a joy just kicking it around, probing for a weakness. It feels like - in true Premier League style - the middle of the park is a checkpoint you need to blow past on your way to a shot on goal. In FIFA, even with the new long pass/first-touch system (which is trickier than it needs to be), there’s little enjoyment to be had in working the ball around the midfield. Passing is crisp, shooting strikes a good balance between spectacle and accuracy, defending feels fair and there’s just an overall feeling of weight and physicality to everything that’s sorely missing from FIFA.Īn example: moving the ball around.
It’s the closest a game from either series has come to feeling truly “next-gen”. Any kinks experienced by PES when switching to the Fox Engine and bridging two console generations over the past couple of years have been left behind, and this year’s entry feels supremely confident in almost all areas. Pro Evolution’s hunger, on the other hand, is evident exactly where it matters most in a game about playing football: on the pitch.
If you’re only after a quick, tl dr verdict, that’s it.
One of a FIFA series, resting on its laurels with a dated engine and minimal improvements, being pegged back by a resurgent PES, running on Konami’s new Fox Engine and desperate to claw back the crown it held for most of the 00’s as the football game to beat. Look past the results, though, and in the past few encounters the flow of the game tells a more nuanced story. EA’s FIFA, flush with cash (and Premier League licenses), emerged around seven years ago as the dominant football title, superior to Konami’s rival PES series in almost every regard. For almost as long as I’ve been comparing these two games - traditional “reviews” seemed increasingly pointless as the years wore on, especially since people generally only wanted to know which of the two they should side for - one has been outright better than the other.