eFootball 2022 season 1 review – too little, too late

Poor Ciro Immobile. He must barely be processing his national team’s non-attendance at the World Cup after winning the Euros last year. The last thing he needed was for me to pick him for my Dream Team campaign in eFootball 2022’s Season 1 update. A lone superstar in a squad of 40-something-rated no names, his has been a campaign of frustration and impotent rage. We have that in common, Ciro and I.

eFootball season 1 reviewPublisher: KonamiDeveloper: PES Productions, KonamiPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S.

This was to be the artist formerly known as PES’s grand redemption. The launch of eFootball 2022 could hardly have gone worse for Konami last autumn, comprising a bafflingly sparse swathe of content, an ugly game of football on the pitch, and the kind of critical reception usually reserved for Activision movie tie-ins of the 2010s.

This first substantial update had a lot riding on it, and the feature list sounded promising – among the hilariously named Stunning Kick controls and the licensed Japanese and Korean Leagues lay a substantial mode to sink one’s teeth into. Finally, in Dream Team, we have something to do.

Which brings us back round to Ciro Immobile pulling on a Parma shirt and taking the field with 10 sub-Sunday league players. Like an old school Master League campaign, Dream Team hands you a team of hapless fictional players at the start, with a decent selection of licensed and unlicensed leagues from around the world to pick a team from. Unlike Master League, you build your team here by earning GP by winning matches (or making use of Konami’s mercifully generous daily login bonuses) and spending it on player cards. This isn’t like signing a player in the old sense – once you own that player card, you’re free to develop its stats as you please.