As you may know, I had written a first impressions thread where I talked about how I had been enjoying my first few hours with the game, and how it felt like a breath of fresh air after having played FIFA for the past decade. I said I enjoyed the unique feel each team and player bought to every match, the exciting commentary, and the absence of scripting.

After spending more time with it, I've discovered a bunch of problems with the game that seem to occur in most matches. The positive points I mentioned above still stand, but there are other issues which really shouldn't exist. My biggest problem is how the defenders react to air balls. They'll be in the perfect position under the ball, i'll press the button required to head and clear the ball, but the players just fail to react to it. They either chest the ball and then get it taken off by the opponent, or just let it bounce off their face. This has led to me conceding 90% of the goals I've let past.
Second major issue is when getting tackled. If your player is tackled off the ball, he'll be stunned for a few moments and run in a certain direction as he does an "off balance" animation which you can't interrupt. This means it's almost impossible for you to recover and win back possession. Your player will just go "whoa" and run a bunch of steps in a direction away from the ball.

Mainly my issues have been with defending. I've also seen goalkeepers let super easy balls slide through into the goal, and make tame efforts to save it. They also punch the ball when the should clearly be holding it. A few of these things may be me being unfamiliar with the game, but most of it is an issue with the gameplay.

Watch all the issues I talked about here -

It's weird. It's almost like PES 16 has solved the issues of the new FIFAs, but it has a couple of gameplay problems of the old FIFAs. Still, PES remains my game of choice for playing with my friends. For single player/ career etc though, I feel FIFA may be more enjoyable (haven't tried the new one yet) mostly thanks to its soundtrack, menus, licenses and the fun skill game system. We still don't have one ultimate winner, it would seem.

Man shows collection of AI tackling him and presents them as problems. Fuck me.

@shindig: No it's the fact that defenders get stun-locked into an unnecessary animation which is frustrating.

With the air ball issues it looks like the game is telling the players to perform context sensitive actions, like trapping the ball on the chest rather than heading it, but without there being any differentiation as to where potential danger zones are. Like when the ball is played into the box while the defending team is under pressure then obviously you would want the player to head the ball away, but if you are just bringing an air ball under control then you would want it to be chested down instead. From the video it just looks like the game's engine doesn't know what constitutes a dangerous situation and what doesn't.

I think you're always going to have these issues though in football games until we come up with a different way of controlling them. It'd be interesting to see if anybody would come up with a way to make a game work where you control individual limbs rather than program animations to button inputs. It would be hell to play at first, but I bet once you broke through that barrier then you could do some amazing stuff! But let's face it, that isn't going to happen!

Yeah, I've been fine on PS4 but can't speak for the PC version. Animation priority's not as big as it is in FIFA and I think you can still super-cancel using some of the shoulder buttons to assume manual control.