eFootball PES 2020 Review

Football simulators are games I always look forward to towards the end of the year. I have been playing both PES and FIFA for more than 10 years now and for whatever reason, I always seem to prefer PES over FIFA, I would admit, PES is far from being perfect, mainly due to its lack of licensing rights for a lot of football teams and leagues but the interesting about that is, Konami constantly strive to make fixing that as easy as possible. I am not going to be comparing FIFA to PES in this review as I feel that is more of “comparing Apple to Oranges”, they both have their strengths and flaws and their different fanbase.

eFootball PES 2020 was released almost two weeks late compared to last year’s release, PES 2019. Konami, this year, is really serious about gaining a lot of followers and getting a number percentage of the football gamers market share and as such, they made a ton of improvements to the game, ranging from the gameplay, ball physics, tactics, graphics, interface, master league, if you were an expert in an older generation of the game, even PES 2019, you may appear as a novice in PES 2020, I have had eFootball PES 2020 for a while but I am still amazed at how much I have to learn in this game.

Gameplay

eFootball PES 2020 made a lot of changes to the way the game is played on the pitch, the ball movements this year is the most realistic I have seen in any football game, the players are now more human-like than ever, I mean you actually have to play this game like you would expect to play in real life, you cannot expect players to make unnatural moves such as giving a good cross when under pressure or always making accurate one-time passes, it is quite frustrating at first because I guess I played FIFA 19 a lot more than I played PES this year and so I am sort of used to one-time passes. As time went by, I came to appreciate just how real the game feels due to the number of errors that the players can make, I mean, passing in this game requires a good amount of brainpower if you want anything meaningful to come out of it. Dribbling requires a good amount of timing, same as defending and shooting, to be honest, the is the closest game to a real-life football game, in my opinion, I hope Konami continues to improve on this.

Graphics

As usual, we cannot talk about PES without talking about amazing graphics, this is one area where PES has always excelled, each year, the graphics of the game keeps getting better and better, the player faces, shirt physics, movements, the pitch, everything looks very close to real life. I believe if you take out the player indicator above their heads, the name bar and radar below, you may actually be fooled into thinking it is a real football match till you look closely, this is mainly due to the new realistic broadcast camera angle, the slow tempo of the game and just how real the players themselves look.

Licenses

Konami usually does not accurately represent big leagues and many teams mainly in Europe due to the lack of such licenses. Also, losing the exclusive rights to UEFA competitions was a very huge blow to Konami in terms of licenses, licensed UEFA competitions are always fun to play in Master League mode. This year, Konami was able to get a good number of strategic partnerships and licenses such as partnerships with Manchester United, Bayern Munich, Juventus while retaining previous partnerships such as with Barcelona, Arsenal.

In terms of licenses, Konami usually does something really interesting, they keep making it super easy to import and use correct emblems and kits for teams and leagues especially in PlayStation and Windows, so if you really care of using the correct kits, you can easily in a very short time import them into your game.

Conclusion

To be honest, there are only a very few things wrong with this game, if you are planning to buy eFootball PES 2020, go for it! You will not regret it at all, it is a great game all around. Whether you will be playing with friends locally, playing online or playing against the AI in Master League mode, you will never be bored as long as you are a football fan.