Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 user review

Pro Evo Wii revolutionizes football games!

Review written by
Ross Fraser

Since the beginning of time, football games have all been played pretty much the same way save perhaps a few tweaks here and there, but it's safe to say Konami has given the pot a good old shake-up here.

Normally you would control one player at a time. None of that "old school" mentality here in Pro Evo Wii, you can pretty much control every player's movement and make them do whatever the hell you want: running into space, onto through-balls or drawing opposition defenders out of their box are just some of the moves you can pull off.

Although there are some very in-depth controls, they start off easily enough. To run you just "grab" your player with the Wiimote and drag him where you want to go - the further away your reticule is the faster he will run. To pass you just point at any of your players and press A, the game automatically chooses the type of pass.

One of the few bad points of Pro Evo is when you are defending, tackling for the most part is just a case of pointing at the player you want to tackle and pressing A, or shaking the nunchuk at the right time to slide tackle, which sounds easy enough but it just doesn't feel that you are in full control of your players as you do when attacking.

In this iteration of the game Konami has decided to leave out the Master League and instead add a new feature called Champions Road, which sees you either make up your own team or play as your favorite team (albeit with fake players). You play through mini-leagues around Europe against lower quality teams first of all as you'd expect, working your way up to the big guns of European football. Along the way you'll also take at least one player from each team you beat to create your own "super-team".

The graphics are another sticking point. While by no means is this a terrible looking game, it's just that Konami have pretty much used the graphics engine for the PS2 version. You feel that since they put all that effort into the controls, they could have tarted up the graphics a bit as well.

Pro Evo Wii includes two player local and online play, which is fun for the most part but online wise I found it difficult to find an opponent with a decent enough connection. A lot of the games were also prone to a bit of lag.

With my minor reservations aside, overall Pro Evo Wii is a brilliant game which plays more like an RTS control-wise than any traditional football game and should be right up on any Wii owners list whether you're a football fan or not.