Screenshots :.
Pro Evo 2008 Wii
Wii
Matt
17-04-2008
"Old Goofy himself performing his usual tricks."
"Through-ball opportunity number 1."
"The tutorials really, really help."
"Some nifty diagrams and such ease you in."
"Cisse? No thanks mate - Torres is much better :-)."
"Through-ball opportunity 2."
You know, this could so easily have been different. Given the recent… er, evolution of the Pro Evolution Soccer series, it would have been expected and probably easiest for Konami to simply port the PS2 version of their latest edition over to the Wii and not given a damn about the unique control system. For that reason alone, Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 on the Wii comes as a refreshing change in direction not only for the series, but also for football games on the whole.
Hold your horses – a football game providing a refreshing change? Yup, in this case it’s more than just PR blurb on the back of the box. The Wii version of what used to be undoubtedly the best footy series on the planet (until the last couple of FIFA games were better, that is) takes the Wii control system and runs with it, allowing you to move players on and off the ball, to dink clever passing moves together and to guide players into space with comparative ease. It’s a football game, Jim, but not as we know them.
The general idea behind Pro Evo Wii is that the Wii-mote acts as your mouse, giving you a cursor that floats around the screen and allowing you to click and select players on the pitch. By clicking and holding the a player with the A button you can cause him to run in the desired direction (with or without the ball too, which comes in handy for finding space), and one you’ve set the little fella off in a direction you can let go of him and leave him to carry on pretty much in the direction you have sent him.
Doing so allows you to focus on other areas of the pitch, and where your other players are. A decent example of this would be having set your winger to dash down the right touchline and then being allowed a few crucial seconds to move your Wii-mote cursor over to your strikers in the penalty area, clicking and dragging them so they run in to space. The general upshot of the basic system is that you should be able to have more control on your players and the space they find themselves in.
Initially, of course, this won’t be the case. The flipside of having a new control system is that it throws you a learning curve that is initially pretty tricky to surmount, and will see countless moves end with your player running out of touch or getting tackled. In fact, one thing that became apparent to me throughout my time with the game is that passing – done by selecting a player off the ball and tapping B – is more crucial than ever before, and that feeding players in space and giving yourself time to think is what it’s all about.
Eventually it does begin to click, at which time you can start concentrating on the other areas of the game. Shooting is merely a matter of shaking the Nunchuck when you wish to blast one in at goal (or shaking the Wii-mote should you want a more subtle chip), and quite soon you’ll get used to the way that the direction of your player running and the speed of the ball governs the power and direction your shot will carry. The keepers in this version also seem markedly better than the butter-fingered dunces that the PS3 and 360 versions came with, so not everything will fly in.
Despite this, the way that the Wii version plays makes for more scoring opportunities. The first reason for this is that the attacking options, be it running a player into space and playing a nifty one-two with him or fooling your opposition by dribbling with the analogue stick before slicing a pass round the corner to your team-mate, are more controllable than ever, and anyone with a smidge of spatial awareness will soon start to find holes in even the most sturdy defence.
The other reason is that the defensive options are a bit limited and fluffy. Clicking on an opposition player with the ball will have a player run toward him, whilst clicking another time will assign another player to do the same thing, at the cost of opening a channel of space in the middle of the park. At times you will spend an age clicking on players aimlessly as the opposition ping the ball around the park and open you up like a badly stitched wound, so it’s fair to say that attacking is quite a bit more enjoyable than the defensive side of things.
Still, you can’t really complain too much. The game offers all new players a tutorial in the basics at the very start of the game and then offers a few more training camps to teach you the more complex moves on offer such as setting an offside trap, and despite the initial cack-handedness it all slots into place very nicely after a while. It’s more of a case of rewiring your brain to give yourself more time and space to do your work in rather than just relying on gut reactions, and once you’ve gotten the controls nailed it opens up brilliantly. It’s possibly not the kind of thing you can leave for a while and go back to expecting to be pin-sharp at the drop of a hat, but once the seeds are sewn it’s more natural than you would have originally expected.
Given that the game so obviously puts most of its emphasis on this new way of control (it takes up 25 pages of the manual with diagrams), you would probably expect that in terms of features and options it may have been stripped down a little, and to a degree this is correct. The standard match, cup and league offerings are available for selection for anyone wanting a quick fix, and there’s also a training option so you can practice your moves and attacks free from the hassle of having opposing players inconveniencing you with their presence. The edit mode, sadly, is rather basic and only allows you to edit team and player names.
The two most interesting modes on offer are undoubtedly the online and Champions Road offerings, with the latter being somewhat of a more simple, streamlined version of the – frankly dull – Master League mode offered elsewhere. The general idea is that you create a team from scratch or select a league team, whereupon you are given some generated players and presented a map screen from which you can select various leagues to participate in. Winning matches and leagues opens up new competitions and increases the skills of your current crop of players and so on and so forth.
The transfer system is slightly changed too; instead of negotiating for players you are instead offered cards after beating a team, and grabbing the card will give you a random player from the opposition as a reward. It’s neat, it’s simpler and it’s a heck of a lot addictive when you get going, and being able to send a friend your team over the interweb and have him take them on with his own is another really neat touch.
The online mode is a all a bit Jekyll and Hyde, allowing you to play either random people or friends depending on your choice. The good part of the whole thing is that, when you manage to find a match, things run really quite smoothly and in fact are much more reliable than the PS3 or 360 versions, with lag only rarely rearing its head. Unfortunately, in the time I was online and looking for a match it occasionally took quite a while to find a match up, and worst of all your player record is not marked or affected if you quit early should you be using, which I had happen to me a good two or three times when I managed to get my nose in front. Konami, in future please save a good few thousand others and me the pain of slamming our face repeatedly into our telly screens and punish those folks who’d rather walk away than lose a fair game.
The only other thing you could possibly level at the game is that it looks more than a little basic, struggling to even match the PS2 version at times with basic player models and some pretty average stadium visuals. It’s not terribly important given how much there is to do out on pitch and it’s not something that will cause you to turn off your Wii in disgust, but a bit of a clean up before the next version would be nice. Oh, and you’ll have to grimace through Mark Lawrenson commentating again, although John Champion makes up for it.
As a package, though, you can’t help but feel that Konami have done a really decent job with the Pro Evo Wii. Not content with simply giving Wii owners another lazy port with tacked-on controls they have instead rebuilt the thing from the ground up, putting a new spin on a pretty stale genre. It might need a bit of time and attention to get the most out of it and it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but when you are offered something that’s so clearly been carefully thought through that’s the least any Wii-owning footy fan could do.
Hold your horses – a football game providing a refreshing change? Yup, in this case it’s more than just PR blurb on the back of the box. The Wii version of what used to be undoubtedly the best footy series on the planet (until the last couple of FIFA games were better, that is) takes the Wii control system and runs with it, allowing you to move players on and off the ball, to dink clever passing moves together and to guide players into space with comparative ease. It’s a football game, Jim, but not as we know them.
The general idea behind Pro Evo Wii is that the Wii-mote acts as your mouse, giving you a cursor that floats around the screen and allowing you to click and select players on the pitch. By clicking and holding the a player with the A button you can cause him to run in the desired direction (with or without the ball too, which comes in handy for finding space), and one you’ve set the little fella off in a direction you can let go of him and leave him to carry on pretty much in the direction you have sent him.
Doing so allows you to focus on other areas of the pitch, and where your other players are. A decent example of this would be having set your winger to dash down the right touchline and then being allowed a few crucial seconds to move your Wii-mote cursor over to your strikers in the penalty area, clicking and dragging them so they run in to space. The general upshot of the basic system is that you should be able to have more control on your players and the space they find themselves in.
Initially, of course, this won’t be the case. The flipside of having a new control system is that it throws you a learning curve that is initially pretty tricky to surmount, and will see countless moves end with your player running out of touch or getting tackled. In fact, one thing that became apparent to me throughout my time with the game is that passing – done by selecting a player off the ball and tapping B – is more crucial than ever before, and that feeding players in space and giving yourself time to think is what it’s all about.
Eventually it does begin to click, at which time you can start concentrating on the other areas of the game. Shooting is merely a matter of shaking the Nunchuck when you wish to blast one in at goal (or shaking the Wii-mote should you want a more subtle chip), and quite soon you’ll get used to the way that the direction of your player running and the speed of the ball governs the power and direction your shot will carry. The keepers in this version also seem markedly better than the butter-fingered dunces that the PS3 and 360 versions came with, so not everything will fly in.
Despite this, the way that the Wii version plays makes for more scoring opportunities. The first reason for this is that the attacking options, be it running a player into space and playing a nifty one-two with him or fooling your opposition by dribbling with the analogue stick before slicing a pass round the corner to your team-mate, are more controllable than ever, and anyone with a smidge of spatial awareness will soon start to find holes in even the most sturdy defence.
The other reason is that the defensive options are a bit limited and fluffy. Clicking on an opposition player with the ball will have a player run toward him, whilst clicking another time will assign another player to do the same thing, at the cost of opening a channel of space in the middle of the park. At times you will spend an age clicking on players aimlessly as the opposition ping the ball around the park and open you up like a badly stitched wound, so it’s fair to say that attacking is quite a bit more enjoyable than the defensive side of things.
Still, you can’t really complain too much. The game offers all new players a tutorial in the basics at the very start of the game and then offers a few more training camps to teach you the more complex moves on offer such as setting an offside trap, and despite the initial cack-handedness it all slots into place very nicely after a while. It’s more of a case of rewiring your brain to give yourself more time and space to do your work in rather than just relying on gut reactions, and once you’ve gotten the controls nailed it opens up brilliantly. It’s possibly not the kind of thing you can leave for a while and go back to expecting to be pin-sharp at the drop of a hat, but once the seeds are sewn it’s more natural than you would have originally expected.
Given that the game so obviously puts most of its emphasis on this new way of control (it takes up 25 pages of the manual with diagrams), you would probably expect that in terms of features and options it may have been stripped down a little, and to a degree this is correct. The standard match, cup and league offerings are available for selection for anyone wanting a quick fix, and there’s also a training option so you can practice your moves and attacks free from the hassle of having opposing players inconveniencing you with their presence. The edit mode, sadly, is rather basic and only allows you to edit team and player names.
The two most interesting modes on offer are undoubtedly the online and Champions Road offerings, with the latter being somewhat of a more simple, streamlined version of the – frankly dull – Master League mode offered elsewhere. The general idea is that you create a team from scratch or select a league team, whereupon you are given some generated players and presented a map screen from which you can select various leagues to participate in. Winning matches and leagues opens up new competitions and increases the skills of your current crop of players and so on and so forth.
The transfer system is slightly changed too; instead of negotiating for players you are instead offered cards after beating a team, and grabbing the card will give you a random player from the opposition as a reward. It’s neat, it’s simpler and it’s a heck of a lot addictive when you get going, and being able to send a friend your team over the interweb and have him take them on with his own is another really neat touch.
The online mode is a all a bit Jekyll and Hyde, allowing you to play either random people or friends depending on your choice. The good part of the whole thing is that, when you manage to find a match, things run really quite smoothly and in fact are much more reliable than the PS3 or 360 versions, with lag only rarely rearing its head. Unfortunately, in the time I was online and looking for a match it occasionally took quite a while to find a match up, and worst of all your player record is not marked or affected if you quit early should you be using, which I had happen to me a good two or three times when I managed to get my nose in front. Konami, in future please save a good few thousand others and me the pain of slamming our face repeatedly into our telly screens and punish those folks who’d rather walk away than lose a fair game.
The only other thing you could possibly level at the game is that it looks more than a little basic, struggling to even match the PS2 version at times with basic player models and some pretty average stadium visuals. It’s not terribly important given how much there is to do out on pitch and it’s not something that will cause you to turn off your Wii in disgust, but a bit of a clean up before the next version would be nice. Oh, and you’ll have to grimace through Mark Lawrenson commentating again, although John Champion makes up for it.
As a package, though, you can’t help but feel that Konami have done a really decent job with the Pro Evo Wii. Not content with simply giving Wii owners another lazy port with tacked-on controls they have instead rebuilt the thing from the ground up, putting a new spin on a pretty stale genre. It might need a bit of time and attention to get the most out of it and it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but when you are offered something that’s so clearly been carefully thought through that’s the least any Wii-owning footy fan could do.
8/10