PES 2010: Pro Evolution Soccer

Potentially just as worthy of applause is the increased transparency off the pitch, with a number of structural changes that allow you to understand and adjust players, positions and tactics without the need for laborious trial-and-error. Player Cards are individual characteristics, some of which highlight strengths such as reactions, touch and particular types of turn, while active cards can be switched on or off, or between several settings. Every player has a card for changing their attitude between defence-minded, attack-minded and balanced, but some of the better ones have adjustable specialties. Frank Lampard has a long-range shot toggle, for instance, which sees him moving into better positions to line himself up, while Luca Toni has a fox-in-the-box card and others can be encouraged to poach and set themselves for eye-of-a-needle passes. You ultimately need to step up to take advantage of their skills, but the cards work to help you.

Player Cards may be the most eye-catching element of the new PES - the kind of trademarkable bullet-point concept more typically associated with the old EA Sports - but Team Style is arguably the more broadly impactful, allowing you to fine-tune things like a team's compactness, how much support the team provides players advancing into the opposition half, the style of your defensive line and whether players will instinctively swap positions to mix it up. Superficially similar to FIFA's Custom Tactics, Team Style allows you to transform a team's behaviour in concert with the Player Cards, and this is likely to ease progress considerably when you're forced to withstand assaults from tougher teams by pressing harder and holding your ground in possession, for instance.

One of the quirks of our preview version is that a lot of the line-ups and formations have yet to be calibrated for release, so you fire up almost any team and discover players wildly out of position. This will be fixed by the time you can buy the game, but in the meantime it helps to highlight another significant change - the loss of the occasionally ambiguous skill pentagon in favour of a 1-100 player rating more akin, again, to FIFA. Individual players have a peak potential rating - Buffon is 95, for instance - but if you put them in a role they're not comfortable with, that drops off, so it's important to keep an eye on their preferred positions, highlighted on the same screen.

All of this is likely to help you back into the revitalised Master League, where there's a new Youth Team section for managing younger players and fast-tracking the best. Konami reckons the new menus should be easier for players to deal with, despite the volume of new options for things like sponsorship negotiations. Veterans of the Master League system may also be pleased to hear that you can qualify for and take part in the Europa League and Champions League, forcing you to deal with fixture congestion and other issues, although we didn't get that far during a week of testing (mostly because of my bitter, ongoing feud with the Eurogamer Expo's Tom Champion).

For all the game's seeming improvements, however, Konami must know that it has work to do to win back the core fans who finally took the plunge on FIFA last year, and PES 2010 will struggle to do so in one swoop no matter how much it reduces the quality gap. After a week at the controls, PES 2010 appears to play a game much closer to FIFA 09, with less of the latter's polish but a more quantifiable relationship between decisions on and off the pitch. However it stacks up in the final reckoning though, there's no question Konami has turned sharply away from the cul-de-sac into which the series appeared to be disappearing last year, and if nothing else PES 2010 looks like it will serve as a decent manifesto for the Japanese developer's future plans. The difficult question is whether it will be enough to see off EA Canada's own efforts, which we'll be considering in a thorough hands-on with a near-finished build tomorrow.