Defensive positional play is a lottery, support runs in attack are unreliable, and an assortment of bugs and misbehaving animations mean you can never rely on any simple pass, let alone mazy dribble, being actioned as intended.Īs for the visuals? Oof. The AI here is erratic at best, abysmal at worst. Iniesta and Pique are colossal names to have attached to eFootball, but their studio time appears to have been spent solely focussing on individual behaviors – with Konami seemingly forgetting the nuances of 11-a-side team intelligence. But like watching your team notch a consolation goal in a 1-5 defeat, the joy in these moments is fleeting. At the back, holding off an attacking winger with a perfectly timed press of L2 – putting yourself between opponent and ball – is satisfying too.
Sensitivity of the R2 button is used well: the harder you push, the further you knock the ball ahead of you, and beating a defender with a deft nudge feels good. Sure enough, one-to-one battles serve up occasional enjoyment. With Konami utilizing the Unreal Engine for the first time, two Spanish World Cup winners, Andres Iniesta and Gerard Pique, were consulted during development in order to fine-tune dribbling and defensive mechanics. Without wishing to sound entitled – it’s worth reiterating that unlike those clunkers mentioned above, this is free – that decision was a mistake. It’s an annual tradition that Konami gets its football game out before EA’s, and sure enough eFootball 2022 preempted FIFA 22 – by a single day. Put simply, this glorified demo patently wasn’t fit to be released. Konami’s sequel to Pro Evo doesn’t plumb such depths – but it’s still dreadful. During PES’s lifetime we had to endure Pure Football, and O’Leary Manager 2000, and Chris Kamara’s Street Soccer, and the genuinely unplayable Xbox 360 version of FIFA 06: Road To World Cup.
I can confirm that it doesn’t fare much better on console, although there’s a sizable dollop of recency bias to social media claims of it being the worst football game ever made. Overall eFootball 2002 is classed as ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’, and by some metrics, it’s the worst Steam release of all time. Of the 16,000+ user reviews so far, just 10% are positive. You’ve likely heard about the Steam feedback by now.
Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC
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