Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 Review

The key to its success wasn't the underlying PES framework - increasingly maligned on PS3 and 360 anyway, and rendered virtually moribund by EA's towering FIFA 09 just a few months ago - but the way that the game allowed players to break free of the shackles of direct control. Football is a team sport, and a lot of the most exciting and beautiful things that happen on the pitch are down to players positioning themselves intelligently, anticipating their team-mates' actions, and improvising as a group. In short, all the things that have traditionally been forced to the periphery by the need to focus on the man with the ball. It's possible to play proper team football in PES and FIFA on PS3 and 360, but PES Wii allowed players to control more of the team at once without having to rely on AI team-mates second-guessing your intentions at exactly the right moment.

PES 2009 for Wii is a cautious evolutionary step forward. After demanding so much persistence and concentration in the early stages last year in order to master Pull and Point Dribbling, never mind the various advanced skill techniques and variations, this is a game of refinement. There are new attacking options like one-twos and give-and-gos, which sound horrible on paper (while Point Dribbling, hold Z and press B to pass the ball, then continue your run), but which anybody with a couple of hours of PES Wii under their taped ankles and Vaporubbed chests will absorb relatively ably, while a new option to direct a shot with the pointer and B button is about as simple and intuitive an update as this spin-off series is ever likely to deploy.

Some of the likenesses are an embarrassment, but the animation quality and frame-rate is up there with the best team sports games on Wii. Shame about the Guess Who spectators though.

Where PES Wii needed most refinement though was in defence. PES 2009 has a fair crack at this, sending a defender after an opposition player automatically so you can then decide to jostle (Z) or slide in (shake the nunchuk), or bring a second defender into play by pointing at the attacker and pressing A. The result more closely resembles the traditional PES tactic of pressing with two players at once, not least because you can still use the nunchuk analogue stick to fine-tune the first defender's positioning. Combined with the existing option for man-marking, it should give you a better range of options to deal with advancing forwards. That said, the new ability to have a man-marker step out to intercept a pass requires superhuman anticipation - so much so that I rarely used it again after a few dozen cack-footed attempts.

It's still much easier to attack than to defend, with more than enough options to bamboozle the easily-confused opposition AI (especially on the starting difficulty level - beating Bordeaux 9-2 in my first Champions League game was an eye-opener), along with any opposing humans who haven't gone through all the training camps. Human vs. human defence is often about exploiting the difficulties you're familiar with in attack rather than any particular control mastery. Given that productive defence is about tight, positional play and reactions, you almost wonder if Konami should give it over to more traditional, direct analogue-and-buttons input and leave the pointer and indirect input playmaking to the expansive forward game. Whatever - it would be nice to see the developers apply the same inventive approach to defence as they have to attack, which isn't the case yet.

Elsewhere, changes are subtle and occasionally rather basic, or still lacking. Free-kicks now involve pointing to the left or right of the keeper and swinging the nunchuk (likewise, goalkeepers can opt for left or right), with player skill determining success or failure. But things like corners and diagonal runs into the box are still too generous, with a disproportionate number of headed goals and low drives nestling in the bottom corner, and nothing much seems to have been done about this. Playing as my beloved Liverpool, with Torres or Gerrard marauding from the right, scores quickly ballooned into absurdity (or perhaps not on the last two weeks' evidence - can I get away with that?), and while I couldn't bring myself to test it out, I was grimly aware of Manchester United's success rate once the ball entered the box in the air and all I could do was flap the nunchuk and hope the instruction to clear would see Carragher or Skrtel prevail against Ronaldo for once.

While it's less of an issue away from the statistical willy-waving of the modern next-gen PES and FIFA battle, it's also a shame that a football game released in late March isn't up to date on transfers, with Robbie Keane, for instance, still knocking them in for Liverpool (or not). The addition of the Champions League and Master League goes some way to making up for this, along with last year's Champions Road, but a game apparently designed for patient, relatively hardcore football gamers who want to master exciting, dynamic team play, it's a bit of a letdown. The Nintendo WFC page in-game has a download option for acquiring new data, but there's nothing available at the time of writing. Updates will be a prerequisite for playing online though, and overwrite Edit Mode changes.

Various camera angles are available, although I got on best with the traditional side-on approach. So did Torres. Glorious Torres.

Fortunately, if things don't go your way with the new control scheme, you can at least resort to playing PES the old way, as Konami has included a traditional option that brings PES 2009 closer to the other console versions using the classic controller or sideways Wiimote. It means you're playing a competent, increasingly antiquated regular football game, but a good one nonetheless. You can also continue to play against friends online, and what lag there is doesn't really interfere too much with your sense of control using the pointer system. Support for four players per system is welcome too, so you can all delight in beating Barcelona, the Ryu and Ken of PES games, together.