pes 2020 suck

Before you read any further, please keep in mind that this is not a reactionary "I just got my ass kicked online" or scripting post. I'm being honest and I decided to give this game a full, unbiased go before making any conclusion. For some background I have always played FIFA and in the past 5 or 6 years it's gone completely downhill. In fact, it dove off the high dive into an empty pool. I am a Division 1 player on FIFA 19. My friend and I would play co-op seasons and we're very much dominant in D1. The reason I say this is because inevitably someone here is going to read what I write and just assume that I suck and thus am giving a rage take. That's not the case here. I considered FIFA 19 to be the worst soccer game i'd ever played.

So what makes PES 2020 the worst soccer game I've ever played? A few things:

Online latency. It's the worst I've seen. We had gotten very annoyed by the latency on FIFA. The input lag could get bad, you would also routinely just disconnect for no reason and get a loss and that was maddening. But ultimately it had a large player base and we always found the experience mostly more positive than negative and when the game played great it was really fun. The input lag was rare ENOUGH that we could put up with it. FIFA 19 sucked, don't get me wrong. It was horrible. This is one of the reasons we said, "hey, let's switch to PES 2020. It can't be worse than FIFA." Wrong. In fact PES is worse. I have yet to play a single match where there wasn't a significant amount of input lag present. You need to effectively hit A to pass the ball a full second before you want that pass to go. You want to switch to a fullback to play against a ball down the wings? You might get lucky and it might switch to the player you wanted, but guess what? As soon as you switch to that player he's going to slam on the brakes and stand completely still thus losing you any sort of ability to play effectively against that attack. It's absurd. Now all of this sounds horrible, but don't worry. If you're playing MyClub you're probably not going to find a match anyways. So what you should do is get a buddy (OR DON'T!!!) and go to Co Op Online. Notice I said that you don't need a buddy to play Co Op Online? That's because you don't. You can play solo with roided up CPU's helping you try to navigate the lagfest minefield. But fret not. If you do have a buddy to play with you guys can fire up a casual game of Co Op Online and pick your favorite team if they're licensed. They might not be, probably not if you're an EPL fan, but in our case we chose PSG, as that's who we play with in FIFA. We found ourselves confused as every team we'd match with were galactico MyClub sides with 101 rated Ronaldo's running around. Konami thinks this is a good, fair, and balanced way to format their online. Why? No one knows. No one likes it that I've spoken to, but that's the way it is. So you have no reason to ever play as anything, but your team full of legends. That's assuming that you grind your ass off in MyClub, if you can even find a match, which you can't or just spend tens or even hundreds of dollars like some players do and get that squad you always wanted. You'll need to keep in mind that playing online with them burns contracts even if they don't play so keep that in mind. Again, though, you'll just play the same team meta stacks over and over again so you might as well spend some money.

Gameplay issues. Have you ever played a game of PES and absolutely bulldozed over a player fully expecting a card to come out, but the ref doesn't budge? Yes you have. Hundreds, even thousands of times you have. Ok, so conversely, have you ever made a clean tackle to get the ball back only for the ref to pull out a yellow? Again, yes. It's broken. The physics system in this game is broken. The referees are completely and utterly broken. There is no argument to this. Offline, online, wherever you play the refs are completely broken.

Passing. It doesn't matter if you are a fully manual player or a PA3 player. The passing is abysmal. In FIFA, it's bad, but somehow it's still better. You can have a wide open player in PES apparently making a run, but the second you through ball him he stops running. You can have a wide open short pass to a teammate 7 yards to your left and you tap standard pass and it's a missile to some winger who isn't open for an easy interception. You can also see a wide open teammate making a run and in the tiny chance that he doesn't stop running you can barely tap the through ball button and the ball will go a mile past your wide open teammate.

Dribbling. Wow, they brought in Andres Iniesta to help with the dribbling. This is going to blow FIFA's dribbling system out of the water! Nope. Wrong again, my friend. At least in FIFA 19 the dribbling is responsive. In the PES demo you could actually pull off dribbling moves which would cause the AI to react to them so you could strategically get past them. But now? No. Do your fancy dribbling technique string that you've been working on. The AI will simply rugby tackle you to the ground for a no call and counter attack you. The system is just inefficient and there is zero reason to use these techniques. Save yourself the headache.

Shooting. I actually like the shooting. It feels great and I have no issues with it. It is truly satisfying when you hammer one into the top corner. The set pieces are a bit too easy once you have them mastered, but they're still fun.

Offline. If you are a solely offline player then Master League is truly a fun experience most of the time. It's not the most in depth mode, but neither is FIFA's CM. I personally am torn between which version I like best, but I'm having a blast on ML right now with Milan. There are gameplay issues that carry over in ML, for sure, but on the whole it's a lot of fun.

Scripting. Holy hell. This is the main reason we stopped playing FIFA. In all honesty, we left FIFA because of the obvious scripting and handicapping. PES 2020 is worse. By far. How? Just play 5 games. I don't even need to break this down.

Bottom line. I could keep going, but I'll stop as this has gotten long. The TL;DR is that online this game sucks. It really, really sucks. It's unplayable to me. Between the lag, input lag, lack of fouls being called, and MyClub squads just spamming modified through balls it's not worth it because you can't defend against because of the horrible player switching and tackling mechanics. The gameplay is a mess both online and offline because of these things. It's way too damn hard to find matches online unless you're on co-op online and in that case be prepared to face only meta MyClub squads. If you're buying this to only play offline ML or couch games then go for it. Offline is fun. But in my opinion, I feel like I wish I hadn't made the switch. It was a waste of money. Hopefully Konami is listening and will patch all of this, but if they don't it's unfortunately back to FIFA for me and my buddy.