Great gameplay. Tedious Franchise mode. Turn off the commentary.
There are a great number of techniques to master, some harder than others, but you can easily play without ever attempting the more complicated skills. In fact, you can be very productive with just dribbling the ball effectively. The AI reacts quite realistically to your dribbling. The AI in some other soccer games will have opponents guard you like glue, stopping on a dime to follow you as you stop quickly or change directions, and maintaining a perfect line of midfielders as you move up and down the field. In this game, opponents here behave much more realistically and independently. Simple dribble moves using the directional pad or joystick and different dribble speeds allow you to open up the defense a bit to give you the room to make a shot or complete a pass. Any move that would be convincing against a human player is convincing against the AI. You can make a goalie attempt a save early even without faking a shot. Simply changing your dribble direction or altering your speed at an unexpected time can confuse a goalie, just like it would if you played 2 player vs a friend.
But the AI is certainly not a pushover. When you manage to score a goal on a team, they will come back aggressively and really test you, especially at as the game nears the end. Even a 3 goal lead or more can be lost before you realize it (and I've had this happen, sometimes with even 5 or 6 goal leads!). Much of the time, you need to adjust your formation to be more defensive after taking the lead. You can adjust some tactics on the fly, like your team's overall defensive vs offensive stance, as well as some tactics like counter-attack and pressing or other tactics that you set beforehand. Sometimes you find that your current tactics just aren't working well vs a certain team/player or formation/tactic that team employs.
This brings me to another point... The variety of action is greatly exceeded anything I expected from a game like this. Each play of a game can be played out in a great variety of ways. Your own teammates will continually move to new positions based on your chosen tactics and their mental skill attributes (which represents how well they can pick their spots and make openings). You may find yourself with a counter-attack opportunity one game, then starting a buildup and lobbing a pass accross the field to keep possession the next play. You'll see opportunities to attack up the center or up the wings, and see chances to cross low, high, or on the ground, or to pass back to an attacking midfielder running up the center for a long shot or through pass to a forward. You'll see spectactular team efforts, and great individual moments. And the replays look great to see them again from a different angle.
The passing just feels right (after you get used to it). It allows great control and placement of passes, since you won't want all passes to go directly at a teammate. You want to be able to place the ball where they can run onto it or be facing away from opponents when receiving the pass. The pass system allows this, and adds even easier control for controlling crosses to be high, low, or on the ground, and far post, near post, center, and near the goal or away from it. With some practice, you can get a ball directly on the head or foot of a charging forward (depending on your player's crossing ability too).
One small complaint I have is that the players are fictional there is no inclusion of US Major League Soccer teams (because they didn't get a MLS license).
One huge complaint I have is the franchise manager mode, where you can start a dynasty and play year after year, building the team up. This is usually my favorite mode to play in sports games. But trading finding and trading or buying players is made into a chore in this game. On easier settings, the players have from 0 to 3 stars to signal how easy they would be to recruit, based on how valuable they are to their current team. But on harder settings, you don't get that information. So you can spend a lot of time searching for a good player, and not having any clue that your chances of recruiting him are slim unless you offer much more than the guy is worth. Meanwhile, there may be another player just as good who you can get easily, but you don't feel like taking the time to find him and offer a deal. But this is manageable, since the game allows you to make a shortlist of players who you are interested in. So you can find a few players you'd like to have, then offer reasonable deals each turn. Then drop them from the shortlist as the offers are rejected until you find one that accepts.
Another big chore of franchise mode is the training. You can train players in certain aspects by doing little training exercises, such as dribbling through cones, or doing playing keep-away against some defenders. These quickly become tedious and you won't want to bother. They do give a good amount of free benefits to your players, but they are time consuming and need to be done for each player whose abilities you want to improve. There are so many training exercises. During the offseason, you can do every training exercise for every player for about 10 times in a row if you wanted (1 time each week of the offseason). To do that for every player on your squad would take longer than it does to play an entire season. You probably won't want to do it even only for a young star on your team because it is such a chore. But by not doing it, you miss out on a permanent increase in abilities. Having to skip this opportunity is unfortunate.
Finally, the last complaint is that there doesn't seem to be too much glory in winning a division or a cup, etc. There's nothing to get you excited about a title race, or being an underdog and pulling out an upset vs a top club. Some sort of newspaper preview or other RPG element would add greatly to the feel of the game. All you get for winning a division is a cutscene showing your team receiving the trophy amidst cheering fans. And you get the achievement marked in your stats. If you have a friend who can play this game with you, then that will improve your experience a lot. Even the franchise mode can become bearable when you compete with a friend.
In conclusion, the gameplay is awesome. But you gotta put up with everything else that feels tacked on and not well thought out. So play franchise mode for the excellent games and ability to customize your team. Forget about training, and do the minimum player dealing that you need to succeed. If you have some friends to play this with, the game will be much more fun.