eFootball 2022 is now the lowest rated game on Steam

eFootball 2022 is now the lowest rated game on Steam, less than a day after its release. Konami’s free “football platform” was announced earlier this year as the successor to PES, with a barebone launch slated to be extended in perpetuity with optional DLC. Yet even accepting its relatively small amount of content, players share screenshots of terrible faces, broken animations, and plenty of bugs.

After more than a decade of annual releases, Konami did not release any new PES games in 2020, but only sold an update to the 2019 eFootball PES 2020 database. As a result, fans of the series have waited twice as long as normal for a new game, and increased expectations for the eventual game. eFootball makes substantial changes to the series, including the switch from Konami’s own FOX engine to Unreal Engine 4.

Overall, however, eFootball offers significantly less than previous iterations of PES. It only contains nine teams, which can only be played in exhibition matches, and its only online mode is “challenge events,” which, according to the Steam page, “may not be available for the first few days. “. Konami has outlined a roadmap for post-release, including online leagues, a team-building mode, and an eSports tournament, but it’s nothing that seems transformative.

So that explains a lot of negative reviews. EFootball is not PES, and not what PES fans want or expect. And then, in addition, there are the faces. Here’s Cristiano Ronaldo, captured by Reddit user Livid_Peach4593:

And Reddit is full of other examples of problems.

At the time of writing, eFootball 2022 has an “extremely negative” rating on Steam, with 92% of its 7,540 reviews rating it “not recommended”. This puts it in a worse position than Paradox’s Leviathan DLC for Europa Universalis IV, which hit 90% negative.

EFootball is now entirely in memes territory, where people download it only to see if it’s as terrible as others are saying, then rush to join the pile with their own negative review. (Out of roughly 2,000 English reviews on Steam, 1,300 disappear if you filter reviews with less than an hour of reading.)

That’s a shame. Not because eFootball doesn’t deserve criticism, but because I want a football game that I don’t have to buy back at full price every year. I was ready for the ‘football platform’.