Free-to-Play PES is Beyond Infuriating to Actually Play

When I heard that Konami were going to be bringing a free-to-play model out for Pro Evolution Soccer 2016, I was cautiously intrigued. I had been unsure about spending full price on a football game that I knew was going to be a real timesucker from my busy schedule, so I’d been biding my time and waiting for the price to drop.

Many gamers must have been thinking the same thing – a low amount of sales might have contributed towards Konami going down the free-to-play route. Although I personally think PES has FIFA beat this year in almost every aspect, the public at large evidently don’t feel the same. Or maybe I am totally wrong and PES 2016 has been a massive success for Konami and they just want some extra pocket money, who knows with those guys.

So, after noticing that Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 myClub had sort of just sneaked onto the PlayStation Store overnight, I started the download, intrigued and admittedly quite excited to see what kind of experience I was going to be in for.

Loading times. Lots and lots of loading times were experienced.

myClub is basically PES’ version of Ultimate Team, but infinitely less polished as I quickly found out. By my guess, I was one of many rushing out to download the free game who connected to Konami’s servers and instantly realised that nothing had changed from the Metal Gear Online launch. Patchy connections meant that many fans were unable to even get into a game with some not even being able to connect until at least the day after launch. Intermittent connection strengths meant that actually finishing a round was almost a miracle, probably down to Konami spending more time on making obnoxious Pachinko machines that shit on your dreams more than actual video games.

It’s even worse for the free-to-play PES. Much worse. I spent two hours just trying to get past its tutorial. Two hours were spent watching “communications establish” and listening to the one song that comes with the game, leaving me dangerously close to a Phil Fish meltdown at any minute. Every single aspect of myClub seems to require a connection to the servers, so even when I got out of the tutorial and innocuously decided to look at my in-game inbox like the fool I am, I was greeted with yet more establishing of the aforementioned communications.

Once I actually managed to launch a game, it was all smooth sailing from there as I enjoyed some fluid digital football. PES 2016 is a fine game that probably deserves any adoration that comes its way, but there’s just one problem: Konami. The beleaguered former video game developer have had their worst year as a business from a PR perspective and they aren’t exactly helping themselves by forgetting to, you know, do servers good.

Until they sort the servers out and add more than one song to provide the soundtrack for hours of gameplay, it might be for the best to download and forget until Konami gets their act together.