Seven months later, updates have greatly improved the gameplay of the PES successor. But the new dream team is coming under fire right away
When eFootball 2022 was released last September, the horror was great. Instead of the heralded next-gen revolution in digital football, the free-to-play PES heir turned out to be a huge disaster in every respect. In the GlobalESPortNews test, we got the receipt for it.
Not only did our review excoriate the Free2Play mess for its lack of scope, ponderous gameplay and absurd amounts of graphical errors, but Steam users also made it the lowest-rated game on the entire platform.
FIFA competitor eFootball in horror mode – Worst game ever on Steam
After many apologies from the developers, Konami has now, some seven months later, released a largely revised version on Steam. What the update 1.0 does better and whether you should perhaps give eFootball 2022 another chance, you can find out in our post-test.
Rewards for bug-fest eFootball – KONAMI makes a fool of itself
What kind of game has eFootball 2022 become?
One thing in advance: If you were hoping that eFootball 2022 could even remotely match the scope of its predecessors, we’re sorry to disappoint you. It quickly becomes clear that everything revolves around the Dreamteam mode.
Although there are still friendly matches in which you can compete against the AI or locally against friends, these only feel like a demo, as they did at the time of release. As before, you can only choose from nine teams: Bayern, Juve, Manchester United, Arsenal, Barca and four teams from South America, which will probably only interest very few people in this country.
So all that’s left for us to do is jump into Dreamteam, Konami’s latest variant of FIFA Ultimate Team. We would have preferred the classic champions league, but at least there is finally something substantial to do. We follow the short tutorial, sign our first player and dive into our first online match with Wolverhampton’s Hwang Heechan and ten no-name players.
It quickly becomes clear that Dreamteam is in no way inferior to FUT in terms of Pay2Win, because our Korean star striker would probably not even sit on the bench at our first opponent. When your opponent’s worst player is Japan legend Hidetoshi Nakata, you know you’re about to get a thrashing.
Worse Pay2Win than in FIFA Ultimate Team
But how do you get such overpowered players anyway? On the one hand, you can get the in-game currency GP by just playing, special events and login bonuses and use it to buy new players via the so-called player list. This is simply a list of all the standard players whose price depends on their strength.
A Lewandowski (strength 88) costs 1.2 million GP, while our striker Hwang (strength 74) was a real bargain for around 20,000 points. Although we started with around 250,000 of these points, most of them came from welcome bonuses and compensation for technical errors and server maintenance.
Earning larger amounts of GP through normal online matches is virtually impossible – a meagre 100 points per match. Only in time-limited events can we unlock larger sums between 2,000 and 5,000 GP. But it’s guaranteed to take half an eternity before you can afford a Lewandowski.
It is much easier to get good players with real money: for 100 coins (1 euro), for example, you can open a loot box that is guaranteed to contain a special event player with strength 85 to 90. Such highly rated players cannot even be bought with the free currency, because Lewandowski is already the best player on the free market with strength 88.
After all, your players earn experience points every time they play and you can invest additional points in different stats after each level up. For example, if we invest points in the speed, dribbling and shooting technique of our Korean star striker, he won’t be a Lewandowski, but he will be a very useful player.
Nevertheless, on closer inspection eFootball 2022 is clearly more Pay2Win-heavy than the competition from EA Sports. Although you can invest hundreds or thousands of euros in lootboxes in FUT, you are not forced to do so as you are here. From our own experience with FIFA 22, we can say that by using your coins wisely in the transfer market and completing the weekly FUT Champions matches, you can raise several strong teams in the foreseeable future without making in-game shop purchases.
We still devalued the game by five points in our test:
FIFA 22 in the PC test: The lowest rating in the series history
In eFootball’s Dreamteam mode, on the other hand, the really exciting players are behind the paywall. We did not find a way to get coins for free.
Gameplay as a glimmer of hope
However, not everything about the big update 1.0 is bad, because on the pitch it now runs much more smoothly than it did a few months ago. Although they were always just the tip of the iceberg anyway, the hideous grimace animations are finally a thing of the past. Although there are still strange animations or faulty collision checks, these only minimally spoil the overall picture.
In addition, the whole thing now plays like a real football game: the ball physics are worlds better and the playing equipment no longer reminds us of a medicine ball. If we hit high balls on the other flank or into the run of our nimble penalty area fox, the trajectories often seem extremely realistic.
The control of our kickers also works much more directly now. There is a huge variety of dribbles we can execute and with a mixture of oversteps, short sprints and abrupt stops, we play our opponents dizzy with a little practice.
At least when we play with Bayern or Barca against the AI. The no-name players of our dream team still control a bit like rusty bumper cars, but that’s probably the way it’s meant to be because of the lousy attributes.
Overall, however, you quickly realise that between all the ugly menus and Pay2Win mechanics, there is still the potential for a great football game. eFootball plays much more freely and realistically than a FIFA, as you are used to from the PES series, in which the same moves and tricks have led to success for years.
Still, what Konami delivers with version 1.0 is simply not enough. Yes, there is now a game mode to keep you occupied for the long term. However, it not only feels pretty empty, but should also only be really fun if you’re not too shy about using your wallet every now and then.
The developers definitely still have a lot of work to do and urgently need to deliver more modes and teams as well as ensure a fairer in-game economy to reduce the extreme grind, otherwise there is no chance at all of building anything like a consistent player base. At least they have now provided themselves with a much improved basis for doing so.
Editorial conclusion
It may sound strange now, but somehow I even had a bit of fun with the revamped eFootball 2022 at times.It’s still significantly worse than the last PES and far from its next-gen pretensions, but at least gameplay-wise it took a big step in the right direction.
Nevertheless, despite years of loyalty to the PES series, I would currently advise any football fan to go for FIFA 22. Of course, eFootball is theoretically free, but all it really has is the rather empty-looking Dreamteam mode. So it’s simply not worth your time and mine.
The update 1.0 leaves me again with a bleeding heart. This time not because the gameplay is still so catastrophically bad. But because it made me realise that Konami actually has quite talented developers – who unfortunately, instead of working on a popular and established series, have to work on a profit-oriented, almost predatory Pay2Win Gacha game.
