Konami’s eFootball is a disaster at launch, Steam’s lowest rated game

Well, the transition from Pro Evolution Soccer to a completely free game eFootball is quite a mess.

by Konami Soccer The game launched on Wednesday with player expectations already set for the future, thanks to a development roadmap promising a lot of core functionality through title updates. But that doesn’t even begin to explain the cavalcade of jank gamers encountered – especially PC gamers, which made it the lowest-rated Steam game of all time, by site metric.

What exactly is going on? That’s good:

Image: Konami Digital Entertainment / Konami via Steam

and that:

Image: Konami Digital Entertainment / Konami via Steam

and probably the most notorious example, seen from many sources:

Image: Konami Digital Entertainment / Konami via EpicPes on Twitter

To be fair, it seems that most of these grotesque contortions, of the body and the face, are manifested in eFootballcutscenes and interstitial cutscenes of. Not that that makes it any more palatable, but the gameplay action seems to be hampered by lesser glitches – although players complain about an overall blur and sloppy animations, some of which could be seen in the trailers. pre-release gameplay.

The situation is bad enough that Konami dropped a general apology Friday morning.

eFootball doesn’t just change name and format, it also changes engine, from Konami’s former proprietary Fox Engine (yes, the one developed eight years ago for Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes) to Unreal Engine 4. Obviously, this failed to provide more impactful visuals and animations, at least in eFootballthe cutscenes of.

But gamers are also disappointed that Konami has failed to deliver on its promises of sharper gameplay, with more realistic one-on-one confrontations, more aggressive defenses, and faster counterattacks. Most of the “extremely negative” reviews on Steam (11,554 bad at last count) give enough credit to eFootball for new things (“concept of the new defense mechanics” and “instant play of bullet collectors without cutting”, for example), while finding a lot to fault the core gameplay.

“The slow, consistent character models of the older games are what kept the gameplay smooth and better than FIFA,” a reviewer said on launch day. “This gameplay is in the middle of the two games. PES ball physics and FIFA player character models, which is excruciating. You cannot mix the two as they have completely different styles.

“Two years waiting for a game without MyClub, no [Master League] Where [Be a Legend modes], and on top of that, the graphics in 2021 look worse than PES 13 and 17? ”they continued.“ I don’t know how this got released. ”(Konami developers skipped a full version last year and instead updated eFootball Pro Evolution Soccer 2020, launched in fall 2019.)

The outcry has legitimate historical proportions. Steam 250, a site that since 2014 ranks all of the games in the storefront against each other based on user scores, currently has eFootball as the worse among his last 100 games. The sports video games on this list were either released in a fundamentally incomplete state (WWE 2K20) or lack important features that their console counterparts have (Madden NFL 22). eFootball, it seems, is both.

“60fps Cap is vile,” said Steam’s “most helpful” review, and it’s really a balanced assessment. “30fps replay cap viler especially since it seems like an easy game to play,” they added. Elsewhere, they have found issues with “control responsiveness at times when the player has the ball 1mm in front of them, but just takes a long time to respond, or it just slides off.”

And now ? Konami’s tweet promises that eFootball “Will be continuously updated, the quality will be improved and the content will be added consistently. An update is already promised for this month. The development roadmap proposed in August indicated that the game would have online leagues, team building mode, cross-platform matches, and a Match Pass system to come in the first big title update.

Looks like it may be pending; otherwise, it should certainly be given lower priority for eFootball get the rest of her [act] together.