All of this is very good news for long-suffering Konami fans, who’ve had to subsist on smaller offerings like Super Bomberman R, a game that launched with the Nintendo Switch in 2017, and 2019’s Contra: Rogue Corps. But the less said about the latter, the better.
In truth, the only fans who could at the very least feign happiness with Konami were those playing yearly installments of Pro Evolution Soccer, which had been the publisher’s most reliable video game franchise for the past few years. In fact, it’d risen the ranks to become a worthy competitor to the FIFA series, Electronic Arts’ international sales behemoth which largely controls the digital pitch. Those days seem to be over for Konami, though.
This year, the publisher has rebranded Pro Evolution Soccer as eFootball, a free-to-play online title that ditches the premium price tag for more microtransactions. It also does away with the series’ old Fox engine in the hopes of bringing a fresh, next-gen experience to diehard fans. The results have been disastrous.
Just a day after eFootball 2022′s release, the title has become the most poorly reviewed game on Steam, according to Kotaku. As of this writing, only 9% of the title’s over 12,000 reviews are positive. Major complaints cover everything from the game’s questionable graphics, to incredibly buggy gameplay, to a serious lack of content. Of course, Konami was transparent about the latter when it announced the game’s roadmap earlier this year, describing the launch version of eFootball 2022 as more of a “demo” that would receive additional content in the coming weeks and months.
At the moment, players can only choose from eight soccer clubs for online and local matches. While the choices are slim, this should have been the ideal content with which to showcase the new engine, but uh…
To be fair, FIFA ships with hilarious bugs every single year, but eFootball’s drastic drop in quality from Pro Evolution Soccer is a sight to behold. Perhaps its biggest crime is its rendering of soccer superstar Lionel Messi (bottom left in the tweet below) who also happens to be on the game’s cover. Konami has the exclusive rights to Messi’s likeness, and even 3D scanned his face for eFootball 2022, something EA couldn’t do for FIFA, and yet he doesn’t fare much better than Cristiano Ronaldo’s truly terrifying visage. Is this supposed to be the other Silent Hill game?