Game Review: Pro Evolution Soccer 2011

PES 2011 is a fantastic mobile soccer title, worthy of the Xbox Live brand.

The game does everything right! The visuals and sounds are great, the gameplay is complex and fun, and the lasting value is very high!

Even though this is only a mobile phone game, you have quite a bit of control over the soccer game. You can substitute players, change the player formations (4-4-2, etc), change player roles, and more. And even though the game doesn’t really have any dribbling moves, you can still perform some jukes by using the joystick and faking different directions. The default controls work well and are pretty easy to pick up. Once you become better at the game, you can change the difficulty settings, which adequately challenge your skills. There’s plenty of different modes to play in, including various clubs and team seasons. Also, there’s an insane number of different teams, complete with all the players on them. But most importantly, playing a soccer match in the game is really fun!

The visuals look really great compared to some of the other things we have seen on WP7 so far. The animations of the players dribbling, chesting, heading, and slide tackling the ball are very fluid, and the attention to detail (different colored shoes for example) is great. The sound effects are awesome; the atmosphere of game time is brought to life by the cheers from the audience. But very occasionally, the frame rate would stutter for a few seconds.

Beating the two clubs where you play tournaments in will take about 4 hours if you play with the normal settings. Then, there’s the exhibition and league modes, where you can get a lot more gameplay in. And whenever you want a quick game, you can jump into a quick match with whichever team you want. Thanks to the different difficulty settings and numerous teams, the game remains interesting for awhile.

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Title: PES 2011
Price: $4.99
Publisher: Konami Digital Entertainment