A legendary series going downhill : The start
Inserting the disc into the ps3 for the first time gives you the choice to install the game (not required to play).But while playing the game you will come to the point to be forced to install it because the game has slow loading times which become faster if you have completed the install operation.For the players luck it doesn't take as much space on the hard drive as other games such as MGS4 and Lost Planet.
By entering the games main menu you come against the classic options such as "Exhibition" , "Options" , "Edit" , "Master League" etc.Only this time you view the options on a dynamic bar which changes up and down....The music playing in the background gives you an nice feel but after a while you will get bored of it.
Now onto the main game.
Sadly Konami could not get all the rights for all the teams which means this year we don't have the F.A. Premier League with the genuine names and uniforms.But the player names are original so whoever is willing to edit everything to the correct form ....be my guest
Gameplay :
The game runs a little slower than PES 06.Players look bigger than normal and the grass just looks dry.If you thought in PEs06 you could score easily then in this years version you will surely be a very good scorer.Its just hard to defend and claim the ball when the referee awards you with a red card for every attempt to do a sliding tackle.Also the shots go way to easily in and the goalkeepers just don't seem to be able to block effectively anything thus paring the ball away leaving the second attacker with the ball and no goalkeeper to save the day...
Also the cpus new feature that is supposed to make the game difficult "Teamvision" will only stay printed on the back of the box.You will never see it in action ingame.
Graphics & Sound :
The player models look detailed , much better than last years game.But still their not next gen.The sound also becomes very boring and the commentators become annoying with their old lines.Also konami used a new graphics engine for the game trying to bring graphics to a new level.But the only thing that it resulted in was the release of a patch to downscale the games textures so it wouldn't crash on the ps3 users.
Online
One thing that a lot of fans wait every year for the soccer simulation games is the online part.This year konami fails to give us a lagless online making the game unplayable in many ways.Also if you dont play for 10 days your division gets reseted making all your efforts go down the drain cause you had to study for you math test that week...Last but not least some features like tournaments are missing from the online mode making the game looking always the same and the same.
Conclusion
Try first the demo.There is no point in bying something that you will not like in the end.And now that this years FIFA is amazing I wouldn't buy PES08.I hope next years PES to be better...