Yesterday Eurogamer published impressions of the free-to-download football game, which launched on PC and console in extremely limited form. As I wrote yesterday, there’s a lot that’s wrong with eFootball, Konami’s follow-up to the beloved Pro Evolution Soccer series. But it’s the player faces that have turned eFootball’s launch into a viral joke. Players are flooding Steam with negative user reviews, decrying the state of the game. That’s bad enough for Konami, but what’s worse is eFootball is now the worst Steam game of all time, according to Steam reviews. Steam250, which ranks Steam games, lists eFootball ahead of 2011’s Flatout 3, 2014’s Uriel’s Chasm and 2010’s Command & Conquer 4 in the bottom 100. Of eFootball’s 10,647 Steam reviews, just just nine percent are positive. eFootball is bad, but clearly it’s not the worst game on Steam (have you seen some of the crap on there?). What it is, is one of the most disappointing releases in recent memory. PES took 2020 off, and the hope was the series would return with a bang. Instead, it’s self-destructed. There’s also the added effect of people downloading eFootball - which is free, remember - just to see what all the fuss is about - then piling on with negative reviews after a short time with the game. There are many user reviews with perfectly valid concerns, but there is a social media-fuelled snowball effect at play here, too. Konami has added a number of notices to eFootball, which can be viewed when you start the game, outlining what it’s doing early days to address some of the problems. One notice promises a fix to a bug that makes the players dissapear. Another promises a make good for poor connections in online play. Clearly, eFootball needs a lot of work. No matter which way you look at it, eFootball has been a catastrophic launch for Konami, and while the company had always said it would update the game with new modes and features, casual fans won’t be impressed - and first impressions are hard to shake. eFootball’s going to need a miracle if it’s going to stage a second half comeback.
