PES 2013 Review

As every year for a while now, the soccer season has kicked off around the globe and with it, a new Pro Evolution title hits retail shelves. Much rests on PES 2013, potentially one of the last games to be released on this generation of consoles before a new batch of hardware arrives and the rivalry with FIFA can start anew. After last year’s solid but not overly enticing outing, PES 2013 adds enough meaningful new features to keep up with the competition and even gain some ground.

Not much has changed in mode offerings this year. You’ve still got Football Life, which includes Be a Legend and Master League modes, both presenting the corresponding experience. In Be a Legend you’re still tasked with taking a created player (with admittedly exhaustive visual customization options) and seeing them become a captain and maybe a World Player of the Year. As manager, choose your squad and attempt to take the UEFA Champions League. While the presentation of a player’s and manager’s lives continues to be a great example of how to create a realistic atmosphere within a sports title, there are hardly any changes to speak of. The storefront which was cumbersome in last year’s game is gone from the main menu, instead appearing in each individual gameplay mode and offering specific unlocks for your career.

The training mode that was fairly basic a year ago now has its own large set of scenarios to tackle. Similarly to FIFA’s attempt, PES 2013 has you playing through skill testing challenges that double as a tutorial for the game. Problem is, these tutorials are not very easy nor fully explained. Where FIFA makes the mode more user-friendly and accessible with multiple levels and silly points and medals, PES is all business with must-complete progression and precise demands. Getting stuck on a specific dribble means you can’t really progress to the next event. The provided text and controller visualizations help, but it’s ultimately up to the player to have the patience and timing required.

This serious approach to the sport continues on the pitch, as fans likely expect and potentially demand. If you feel weak in the knees after seeing the game’s manual, which contains no less than four pages of controller instructions, this might not be the game for you. However, seasoned PES players and those looking for a challenge will find the game quite enjoyable. This is a complex game of footy, with a slower approach in PES 2013 and new tricks to play around with. Compared to EA’s FIFA, the gameplay is more about control and tactics than outrunning the opposition.

New gameplay mechanics include a trap and contain defence system, AI refinements, and so called player ID. While these systems do provide notable improvement over PES 2012, they aren’t quite enough to revolutionize the series. Compared to FIFA 13’s artificial intelligence, attacking players in PES will still appear miles offside and some genuinely great chances will be denied due to bad player positioning. Thanks to so much control complexity, PES 2013 is also very much an attacker’s game. Defense still only has a few moves to make and requires tons of precision to tackle without getting a card, meaning cautious players will just helplessly watch as the opposition just runs past their back line.

As always, PES is often seen in a negative light due to a lack of an official FIFA license, meaning there are only a few leagues and teams that are realistic in the game, compared to EA’s full database. This is again that’s something up to the fans to fix with manual patches and customization tools. Even for the rights that the game does have, for example the UEFA Champion’s League, it feels like more could have been done. The menu and field presentations are authentic, but it feels rather impersonal and like a different view of the same thing. Even the celebration of winning the actual cup is largely unchanged and feels rather short for such a great accomplishment. So if authenticity is a crucial factor for you, then sadly PES still lacks in that department.

Online competition has been tweaked slightly as well, most notably with a new opponent rating system. Depending on how often a player quits out of a match or how many fair-play community ratings a player gets from others, he will have a chance to be matched up against other like-minded and serious players more often. Master League Online is also back largely unchanged, not that there’s anything currently that needs fixing. The game does have an online pass this year, so you’ll need to enter a code before jumping in – annoyingly enough, our online code didn’t even work and we had to engage customer support to get it resolved.

PES 2013 looks and sounds well enough, but it doesn’t quite live up to FIFA’s sheer variety. The audio design stands out as particularly subpar, with a very limited soundtrack, overwhelming and low quality crowd audio that’s hardly dynamic, and commentary leaves much to be desired. Celebrations aren’t user controlled – but that actually works together with the realistic visual style to create a more satisfying celebration atmosphere than FIFA, thanks to the raw emotions of the players and group animations. Couple of technical annoyances include the excessive and very frequent loading screens, and still the inability to skip to the end of the game if your Legend player has been subbed off.

As such, Pro Evolution Soccer 2013 continues on its long run. It’s a title that offers some meaningful gameplay enhancements and a complex control scheme that any sports game would be jealous of. There are some new features here and there, but it’s all largely lost under the layers of familiarity. Lack of licensed teams and leagues, average presentation, and not a hint of any genre-defying additions make PES 2013 a decisively average but solid footy outing. It’s a step in the right direction, as always, but there is still some ways to go.