PES 2012 would be a game worth playing if the FIFA franchise had stopped in its 2009 edition.
The Good:
The first thing I do after I start a new version of FIFA after playing the introductory tutorial, which was sadly missing from PES 2012 (see: The Bad), is take a dive into Manager Mode, or, as PES calls it, Master League. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the Master League mode and was happy to be able to create a character and to have animated interactions, instead of looking at a simulated computer screen in FIFA. While I much prefer FIFA's interface and display to PES's awkward menu with the players training in the background, Master League trumps FIFA's Manager Mode in terms of depth and control, leaving much more responsibility in the players' hands.
The large quantitiy and wide variety of unlockables are also something this game has to offer that FIFA doesn't. While I don't appreciate not being able to use my chosen team's real line-up right away in Master League mode, the rest of the unlocks are fun and work as an extra incentive to keep a player going.
The Bad:
There is much to improve if PES wants to compete with FIFA, but I will only deal with the most significant issues, starting with game play.
Game play seems sluggish and unwieldy, with the players seldom doing precisely what you want. The dribbling system is overcomplicated garbage, and the controls are not efficiently explained through the boring and time-consuming challenges they call a tutorial.
Defending is boring, inefficient, and confusing. Player positioning is atrocious, with players missing headers when the ball is directly in front of them far too often and not even trying to move out from behind defenders half the time. Even though the second player control system is a welcome and refreshing addition to the football sim genre, it is inefficient, and if it is not done then the player that would receive the pass often does not bother to make a run.
Passing is unwieldy and inconsistent, a light tap resulting just as easily in a short pass as a long one.
The lightest touch of the shoot button can make the ball soar way over the goal, so it seems superfluous to allow the player to add more power to the shot.
Finally, turning computer assistance off results in the computer doing absolutely nothing, and that includes a player that you do not control doing anything at all to take the ball from an attacker that is directly in front of him. Turning assistance on, however, is even worse. It is all too common to try to clear a ball with a defender you control only to have a defender you don't try to clear it at the same time, resulting in an own goal. In fact, it is almost as common as having a perfect cross fly towards a lone attacker in front of goal, only to have it intercepted by an impossible diving header from an attacker you do not control that only succeeds in sending the ball out of play. If losing a game because of idiotic AI doesn't sound like fun to you, I suggest you learn how to do everything yourself, and do it fast.
The Ugly:
Since there is far, far too much of this to list in order of importance, I will simply discuss some of them as they hit me.
First came the music, and I use the term lightly. The music is unbearable. The music in PES 2012 is better suited for Tekken or a racing game, but it has no place in a football simulator and I found myself muting it in the settings after about half an hour.
Then, came the licenses. I realize that the Spanish PES fanboys will burn me at the stake in their fiery rage for this, but La Liga is not the only league in the world. It is a huge issue that the PES only managed to license two EPL and two Bundesliga teams, succesfully dooming anyone who doesn't support a La Liga or Serie A team to a flaming hell of bad names and stupid logos. I don't want to look at the damn screen and see "London FC" instead of Chelsea, or "Merseyside Red" instead of Liverpool. It hurts the realism of the game and it makes people want to stick to the teams whose name and logos are actually real.
Finally, there is a huge graphical bias. While FIFA's days applying the FON (Freak of Nature, for those of you that never played before 2010. Look it up.) profile to every player but Rooney, Ronaldo, and Messi are over, many of the less important players (probably a good half of teams like Newcastle, Malaga, etc) still don't look much like their real-life counterparts. However, it's still a hell of a lot better than PES's sad excuse for realistic faces. While every single player on the starting squads in Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Barca, Real, Inter, and Milan are rather well-done, the players of every other team (except, perhaps, for Porto) look little like they do in real life, and you can tell the lack of detail that went into their creation.
PES 2012, is not a terrible game, but neither is it a good one, or even passable. It is more entertaining than FIFA's glitch-filled 2009 edition, but the praise stops there. PES is having trouble with issues FIFA fixed 2 years ago, and it is not worth paying the $49.99 price tag when a used version of the superior FIFA 10 is readily available for as low as $8 online.
I give this game a rating of 5/10 because the virtues of Football Life and the wide variety of unlockables are heavily outweighed by the lack of variety in licensed teams, the useless and primitive AI and, most of all, the uninspired, unpredictable, and overall catastrophic game play, and it is lucky to receive that.