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.
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.