As I first started playing Pro Evolution Soccer 2010, something unprecedented happened. I won my first match. Not just that but I won it comfortably, 3-0. As I played more I continued to win, banging in all kinds of goals, from thumping headers to runs in from the wing to powerful long shots. In one Champions League match as North London, Theo Walcott scored four goals against Inter – the team who went on to win that year’s real-life tournament in miserly fashion. Scoring all these goals was a lot of fun, and absolutely unlike any experience I’ve had with any of the previous games in the series.
At one level, my surprise success had me thinking about just how much single player first impressions are influenced by the default difficulty setting of the AI. A change to that can completely change an experience, and there was at least one occasion when an offside trap melted with such alacrity that it did feel like I was being provided a personal service. On the other hand, in my experience of previous versions of PES, my opponents’ outfield players could have all been transmogrified into traffic cones and I still doubt I would have been able to score four goals in a match. Something else was going on, which brings me inevitably back to the comparisons I tried to get away from last time.
The number one thing I would have still struggled to get right in previous versions is to judge my shots right, to avoid the blaze over the bar or the trickle to the goalkeeper. In Pro Evolution Soccer 2010, perfectly judged hits into the corner came easily. The same thing happened with placing passes elsewhere on the pitch. I don’t think this is because of the game being easier, though it’s possible there was some extra assistance. The bigger factor is muscle memory. The reason I struggled with previous ones is because I tried to shoot the way I’d been trained to by hundreds of hours playing FIFA games. And suddenly, in Pro Evolution Soccer 2010, shooting like it was FIFA worked.
Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 is not a FIFA game. It has the same close-up, detail-oriented view of football as Pro Evolution Soccer always stood for, and retains its own unique sense of weight, though movement comes with an easy fluidity that stands out from its immediate predecessor. It sounds different, with commentators sounding impressively like they are commentating in a noisy stadium at the raspy edges of their vocal capability. It looks PES’s own unique brand of gorgeous, with replays highlighting how many moments can be taken out as beautifully posed tableau, and tunnel sequences before matches showing off disconcerting player likenesses. It does a lot to play like a FIFA game, though, in much the same way as EA once attempted the reverse of.
The similarities are very apparent in the presentation, too. It further builds on Pro Evolution Soccer 2009’s inclusion of the Champions League, not just in adding a funk guitar interpolation of its anthem to its half-time menu screens but on having enough licenced teams to build the competition from. For other newly-slick menus, it belatedly dives headfirst into the world of licenced music, with a selection of mostly-British indie which feels like it’s been beamed in straight from 2005. Literally in some cases (hi Dakota by Stereophonics, actually no problem hearing you again). I found the whole thing completely charming, and at the same time hard not to see as borne from a desperation related in the fact that this would go on to be the last Pro Evolution Soccer to reach #1 in the UK charts for seven years.
Top of the charts for week ending 24 October 2009:
