This finely crafted soccer sim will be lauded by fans who, almost certainly, will base their judgements around the word "feel". As in, doing almost everything in PES 2016 feels fantastic, from fearless and desperate sliding tackles, to holding up the ball under pressure, to the heavenly wave of pride that comes with outthinking and turning a defender.
Such ethereal joys make PES 2016 wonderful in ways that its peers and predecessors are not. How developer PES Productions has delivered on this, however, is tricky to discern. Great design is transparent, goes the saying, and 2016's triumph does not come from a standout feature that can be snappily summarised on the back of the box. It's not your old smartphone but now with a fingerprint scanner. It's not Malibu Stacy with a new hat.
PES 2016 sings in your hands for more elaborate reasons, namely how it wonderfully converges two rather sexless elements: Physics and AI. The advances made in these fundamentals have achieved a more physical, smarter, strategic soccer sim for both football nerds and casual fans alike. It's more fluid, fluctuant, and alive than ever.
Above all else, the most meaningful stride forward is the new collision system, which so much now hinges on. Considering that soccer games live and die by their authenticity, and that dynamic physics systems almost inevitably throw up gif-worthy calamities, you have to commend the audacity of PES Productions for betting the whole farm on its new tech. What's quite remarkable is how faultless it has turned out to be, free from comical miscalculations and distorted momentum swings.
Flaccid terms like "collision system" may not ignite the hype, but the tech is a godsend. It brings new life to challenges for possession; no longer are they binary exchanges where either a tackle works or doesn't. Here, fights for the ball are more organic, unpredictable, combative affairs. PES 2016 doesn't rely on canned animations of players giving up and falling over; instead players barge back, protect the ball, and scramble for balance when their shins are clipped. You have more control over your fate, and no longer do you feel anxious to pass the ball away when under pressure. Players can protect themselves, wait for options to unfold, and if fleet-footed enough, can dance out of trouble.
Those challenging for possession will prod and push, but reaching the ball does not equal automatic success. The player collision meshes are water-tight, which, combined with the brainpower of the physics system, means that erratic sliding tackles can result in tangled legs and the ball bobbling away. Meanwhile, the tech also gives smaller players the chance to disrupt towering centre-forwards as they jostle to connect with an oncoming cross. Ultimately it means that timing and canniness has become just as important as ferocity and speed, giving PES 2016 an excellent feel (that word again) of realism and fluidity. PES 2015's aggravating pass delay issue, meanwhile, has been fully resolved.
The outcome of such improvements might be considered a key moment for Konami's dethroned soccer series. PES 2016 proclaims that no longer do you have to play games of tactless scuffles for possession in search of that Hollywood goal. No longer should you settle for a robotic and clunky back-and-forth for control whilst you pray for that scintillating breakthrough. This is a game that converts the minute-by-minute battles for possession into micro-sized wars of glory and anguish. PES 2016 wants you to have fun between the highlights. This is a game that revels in its own scrappiness, with passes pinging wayward from the outstretched leg of a indomitable defender, with shots deflecting off shins and knees and into the opposite path of where the keeper was diving.
It's not perfect. In the transition to the new physics system, it appears that PES is not quite sure what a foul is. Any tackle is deemed fair game providing the ball is touched, and while that is an understandable baseline rule, in practice even the most perverse and dangerous sliding tackles are unpunished. One suspects the officials would allow E. Honda's Hundred-Hand Slap as long as he flicked the ball in the process. Meanwhile, assaulting a random player, accidentally or not, sometimes isn't even deemed a foul. There is a reasonable argument to be had in Konami's defence, in that the flow of a game shouldn't be disrupted by silly and inconsequential fingerslips, but nevertheless it breaks the illusion.