Winning Eleven: Pro Evolution Soccer 2007
March 1,2007 - If you have played any recent version of Winning Eleven you’ll no doubt feel quickly at home with this latest iteration. The interface and menus are basically the same, and the gameplay is largely the same as well. While this still adds up to greatness, it would be nice if Konami would spice things up a bit. While they have added a new mode here or there and spruced up the menus a tad, the game is in obvious need of a facelift.

One area of the series that does not need any help is in the on-field action. As always, Winning Eleven provides the most in-depth quality soccer match on any console. The player animations have been slightly beefed up since the last game, which is saying a lot since they were already spectacular. Pair the better animations with a faster pace and you already significantly improve on last year’s game. The game’s quicker speed is kept in check due to the better, realistic character animations. Players dribble the ball closer to their bodies giving them more control over the ball and interact with each other in a more realistic fashion. Collisions also have more impact than before.

Realism is carried over into the tactics of the on-field strategy as well. If you have played soccer competitively, you will have a much easier time than a non-soccer player. Setting up with quality short passes is crucial to scoring goals, especially on the harder difficulty settings. Crosses from the sidelines are always a good tactic, but just like in real soccer, they don’t work as often as you would like. There is a plethora of new tricks and feints if you want to get fancy with your footwork. Don’t expect that to get you many goals though; the only real effective scoring method is to play a position type game ad wait for that perfect through ball.

Once you get a handle on the new gameplay style, you will no doubt want to dive right into the master league mode. Master league is essentially a career mode where you can take an existing team, or create a club of your own, and take them to glory while managing the players and budget. Managing your players can become a lot of work, but Winning Eleven keeps this aspect of the game interesting with awesome growth charts. Your players will grow in skills over time depending on their age and how much play time they get. Setting up a new team with a batch of promising young players and watching them grown into champions is one of the most satisfying aspects of the game.

Online multiplayer’s return creates some great replay value. Matches are plentiful, and are extremely fluid with very little lag. You are now assigned with a league card that keeps track of stats and the like. Also players are grouped by language, making it easy to see who you are going to be matched with. Unfortunately the match making system is still clunky and slow, making it a bit of a chore to get a match going quickly. If you can look past that one flaw, the online play will have you playing for a long time to come.

While the master league mode and online play are fantastic, they just don’t offer much new to Winning Eleven fans. This becomes even more apparent as you browse the menu system. All the menus are fairly ugly and they are almost identical to previous installments. The usual licensing issues that Konami has had also plague this version. Some new licenses have been added for some international teams like Holland and Argentina, yet others have inexplicitly disappeared. Now the English Premier League appears with only two licensed teams. Manchester United makes an appearance as well as Arsenal, yet Chelsea was removed despites appearing in last year’s version. The character graphics have also taken a bit of a hit since last year. The characters just don’t look like their real life counterpart (especially Cristiano Ronaldo).

Konami flounders a little bit in the audio department as well. While the crowd audio is still fantastic and the on field sounds are still good, the audio commentary by Peter Brackley and Sir Trevor Brooking is exactly the same as before. While the commentary is not terrible, it just repeats itself way too often. Maybe Konami could only get these guys in the studio to record commentary one time so they must recycle the commentary every year. You also get that trademark Winning Eleven menu music that sounds like “Muzak”. The audio is not quite enough to make me want to turn the sound off altogether but if Konami doesn’t make some changes soon it might be.

When all is said and done, Winning Eleven: Pro Evolution Soccer 2007 is still the best fútbol game out there. Even with some recycled content, and the bland menus, Winning Eleven boils down to one key aspect that no other soccer title has; great core gameplay.

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