eFootball 2022 Review: Maybe the Worst Football Game in Steam

eFootball 2022 Review 

The PES vs FIFA rivalry has been one of the greatest video game rivalries we ever saw, most of all because they have always been even, but this time we have a clear winner. eFootball 2022 has become one of the worst launches Konami has brought to us by a mile. Let me tell you, is not normal to reach the bottom of the Steam table and not even get 10 points in Metacritic among users; you need something bad to did this, something bad level Superman 64 or Ride to Hell: Retribution.

Let’s start with the first thing: the graphics. The graphics are one of the few strengths of the game… when they work well, of course. The new previews of the matches, the camera angles after a replay, the celebrations, make everything feel a little more natural and immersed than before, as it usually happens in a broadcast of a match, and during replays you can see the extend the game wants to reach in graphic fidelity… But these are the only good things about the graphics.

The new graphic motor, Unreal Engine 4, helped the game to become a meme: players spinning their heads after receiving a foul, players running like Naruto with dislocated shoulders, the ref melted on the grass, and the funniest one; every time a player tries to speak, shout or celebrate, they open their mouth like aliens which leave a weird image. Also, the players look ugly as hell, but the 2 best footballers in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi, had a special treatment since they look much worse than the others.

Yeah, we can say that “graphics are not everything”, and it is almost true. In fact, the gameplay is as important as the graphics but here lies another issue, maybe the biggest one; Konami said that this new video game would be focused more on the gameplay, on the one-on-one clash, and everybody knows that the skills in football video games are important; what if I told you that you can’t do any skill or feints in the game? There are no feints in the game. Of course, they said that several mechanics would only be in future updates but that is no excuse, something like skills and feints must be in the game since the beginning. No bicycles, no taquitos, no enganches, the only thing you can do is passing the ball in a way that not even Guardiola or Luis Enrique would approve because is extremely imprecise. And by the way, forget about who is slow or who is fast, because the moment your player starts running, he turns into Sonic the Hedgehog running with crocs because is extremely hard to stop.

Defending in this game is a lottery, sometimes you are Thiago Silva and sometimes you are Titus Bramble. In previous games is easier to kick the ball out of danger with a defender, right? Well, in this game is easier to kick the attacker away from the ball because almost every single time you want to press, the defender goes to the attacker instead of the ball and while pressing (standing) the defender starts using his strength to gain possession, that is normal, that is good… But what is not good is that using this, can result between hitting the opponent, tackling him, or hitting him with a punch. These aren’t intended to be fair, but the animation glitches make it look like they do that.

Lastly, let’s talk about the game modes; everything was planned to start with an exhibition mode with 9 licensed soccer teams, right? But, when you start the game for the first time, you are introduced with an Argentina vs Portugal, take advantage of that match because you will not see them again, but after that, we have a new event to increase our confusion; will be able to choose from an immense number of clubs to play online against other people: the English Premier League, the Serie A and Serie B from Italy, the Ligue 1 from France, the Liga BBVA, and the “Rest of the World” (includes FC Bayern and Zenit St. Petersburg), it also includes the Argentinian and Chilean leagues, some Peruvian teams and three Asian leagues.

But what is the problem? Well, the problems are that any of these teams are available for the Exhibition mode. Why? I don’t know why, nobody knows why. By the way, I almost forgot, once you have chosen a team in this online mode you will not be able to change it again, why? I don’t know.

If you start searching for a game in the online mode you can’t cancel it, because it does not recognize it. If you want to change the formation before the match you have to move each player one by one to the position you want, and good luck with that, because you can’t move a player to a position he does not play (for example you can’t move a player from the defensive midfielder role to the attacking midfielder role).

We know that this game will be free to play and we can’t be mad at that, but there are a lot of things that must be fixed in this video game, you can’t release an incomplete video game even if it is free to play. And we know that Konami will make everything to fix this game because is a new chapter in their history they already apologized to everyone on Twitter after receiving their feedbacks and petitions and they will start updating the game so they can fix each error in it.

The first impressions of this game were horrible, everybody knows that; but maybe we can witness a second start, just like No Man’s Sky, a game that started horrible and later had a “second coming”. So, let’s cross our fingers as we hope that eFootball 2022 will have its own second coming.

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