PES 2018 review - Familiar flaws, but still the football purist's choice

When you reach a peak in performance, as Pro Evolution Soccer has done over the past few years, there is always the danger of diminishing returns.
In many eyes, PES 2016’s elevation to the best football game ever made was absolute. Its extraordinary blend of mechanical excellence, tactical variety and manic unpredictability had all the hallmarks of the beautiful game. The chaos and control that makes football what it is. Never mind the lack of glitz and authentic kits. Never mind it could never compete with EA’s FIFA juggernaut on sales. Plenty of us moan about how the sport has become dominated by business. PES got to the heart of matters on the pitch. And we loved it for that.
PES 2017 refined this smartly and efficiently without making quite the same impact. Matters off-field, meanwhile, remained a notable weak point. Scrappy modes and ropey presentation went largely unaddressed. But, still, that football eh? Bloody hell.

So that PES 2018 spins a very similar tale is both impressive and a bone of contention. The football remains superb, with a handful of (largely) effective tweaks. But incremental improvements mean that the cracks PES has are more visible.
Let’s start where PES 2018 continues to excel. On the pitch it remains the most tactically rich and varied football game out there. Matches tend to have their own narrative, dictated by the style of the team and adaptability of its players. Its greatest strength remains the individuality of the footballers, with their unique assets needing to be taken into account and used effectively. Romelu Lukaku is a beast, able to hold up play and power past the last line of defence. Maestros like Messi and Neymar have the ball on a string, wriggling past challenges with quick, sharp movements, even more so with more finely tuned dribbling. Speedsters like Aubamayeng are let loose after last year’s notable nerfing, zooming past any lumbering defender he would have on toast back in the real world. Quite right.

In a sense it is easy to recreate the facets of the world’s top players. But PES 2018 manages to apply its variety as you move down the leagues. Get into a Championship scuffle or delve into France’s Ligue 2 and everything is more physical and direct. And not simply in the sense that its players are slower and less accurate, but in how they approach the game. You can’t string together passes or wang a through ball out to the wing with the outside of the boot like the top players, so you have to adapt. Go long. Hold up play.

In every sense, there is a tactical approach that will suit your team. Whether it’s the high energy Klopp-favoured Gegenpress, or defter strikers dropping back into a false nine position, your team will notably adapt to shifting strategies. It’s impressive stuff and, with a few exceptions we will get to shortly, is generally improved by any tweaks PES Productions has made.
Most notably in physics and physicality. The ball now reacts correctly when hitting any part of the body, a feature that I imagine few realised wasn’t in previous games, due to the smoke and mirrors used to disguise any foibles. But once implemented it makes a clear difference for both the game’s precision and chaos; the ball pinging around the area in goalmouth scrambles, or being plucked out of the air by Ronaldo’s outstretched thigh before bringing it down onto the side of his boot. The ball can feel like it lacks a bit of fizz at times, passes languidly making their way along the turf, but largely its behaviour is impressively authentic and unpredictable.

Physical battles are much improved too, with players fiercely jostling for possession, while your body position when receiving passes or making challenges is more important than before. It’s also a lot easier to back into defenders when the ball in the air, allowing a beefy number nine to take down and shield long balls.

As part of PES 2018's sporadic licensing, it has exclusivity to Barcelona's Nou Camp stadium.

It’s terrific stuff, if an incremental improvement, which can make any flaws more noticeable. There is a notable disparity between attacking and defending AI, for instance, though it’s tricky to say whether it’s because the forwards have improved or the defenders have regressed.
Strikers, wingers and marauding full-backs make exceptional runs to find space, usually autonomously, but even the best defenders often fail to match the positioning. The result is that goals from crosses are unusually common, as a canny centre-forward nips in, powering a header home while his marker drifts to the back post. Goalkeepers, too, are a little keen on the camera save, dramatically scooping pea-rollers over the bar when a simpler stop and hold would have sufficed.
These balancing issues only stand out because PES 2018 is otherwise so brilliant in its mechanics. Particularly when playing other human beings, where its variety, ferocious back and forth and occasional madness mask any minor foibles.

What is becoming less easy to overlook is PES 2018’s seeming refusal to address the series’ long-standing off-field issues. The game’s main single-player mode, Master League, has barely changed, save for a ‘Challenge’ mode that makes signing players for your team more difficult. Starting out with a team of nobodies and building your team still has it charm, but is starting to feel a little musty in the face of the competition. MyClub, too, remains a poor relation of FIFA’s Ultimate Team. Noone is expecting a cinematic story mode like The Journey or believes that Konami can funnel as much cash towards certain things like EA can, but the options for modes in which to play that excellent football is starting to look rather tired.

You can buy Usain Bolt in PES 2018's MyClub mode... for some reason

Presentation, meanwhile, remains appalling. Not in terms of how it looks on the pitch --in motion it is a handsome game, while many of its player likenesses are second to none-- but in more or less everything else. There is little publisher Konami can do about its hodge-podge of licensed teams in the face of FIFA’s dominance in that area, while its unofficial embrace of fan-made customisation makes it easy for players to update their game if they want the latest kits. But menus are unfathomably ugly and, more importantly, irritating to navigate.

Peter Drury and Jim Beglin’s commentary, meanwhile, is again abysmal to the point of distraction. In fact it has conspired to get worse, mixing stilted, incongruous waffle with just plain weird phrasing. If I ever again hear about an attacker having ‘too much flesh and blood’ in the way when having a cross blocked, it’ll be too soon. Because I’ve turned it off.
There is a school of thought that this scrappiness is part of PES’s underdog charm. But in, the here and now, with Konami continuing to grab for sporadic big licences like Barcelona it feels we are long past the quirkiness of stuff like ‘the wind shooting through the stadium’.
So yes, a similar story indeed. Because despite all of this, PES 2018’s extraordinarily good action continues to push the peripheral stuff where it belongs... in the peripheries. But in the context of continuing to assert itself as the purist’s choice, there is still plenty of change needed off the pitch. Still, that football eh? Bloody hell.