If you're looking to play this year's Pro Evolution Soccer, you could do worse than check out the PC version. Judged on its own merits, it stacks up well against the console equivalents by looking sharp and playing well, especially if you have a couple of Xbox 360 joypads. However, compared to other sports games, Pro Evolution Soccer is struggling to keep up with the times. The presentation is unpolished, with poor online functionality, mediocre commentary, and few officially licensed teams. More importantly, practically no new features have been added to last year's game while the online gameplay is buggy with frequent lag and disconnection problems. Ultimately, PES 2008 plays a great game of football, but it's starting to seriously fall behind its contemporaries in terms of features.
If you're a newcomer to the series, you'll be impressed at how well Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 plays. It captures the realism of the sport almost perfectly but, most importantly, it also remains eminently playable. Thanks to a combination of exquisite control, superb animation, and worthy artificial intelligence, it's highly replayable in single-player, but it really comes into its own in multiplayer. With that said, series veterans may wonder what exactly Konami has done to improve the gameplay in the past year. Aside from making minor tweaks to the animation and AI, it's fundamentally unchanged from Pro Evolution Soccer 6.
