This year’s Winning Eleven keeps the flag up but somehow leaves some space for FIFA too. Released on most major platforms, the PC version is probably the worst. It’s a PS2 port and this is why the game lacks most of the common PC features.


The game receives little facelift from the previous version, not to mention the menu. There are many modes available including a training mode which tries to describe you all the game’s aspects, a custom league/cup mode, the exhibition mode which is actually a quick 1vs1 multiplayer and of course the master league. Master league is the most interesting mode as it allows you to take a team and run it through the league. You have the option to develop your players and to allow the AI to do a bigger or a smaller part of a manager’s club duties. You can purchase new players, sell yours, strengthen your team as you strive to win the league and win the cups.


The game is easy to start and you can just play one game if you don’t have time but at the same time is very deep and it offers you plenty of options to take care of everything related to your team: tactics, strategies, formation, player roles, everything that is needed in order to keep you team up and running.

In order to play the game at its best, you must play it in a higher resolution. I used 1600*1200 and only at that resolution the game started to look good.


As you start playing, you will notice that some minor things were changed in the game.  The players act more naturally, they got some new moves, they are more fluent which helps as you can tell what your teammates will do next or what to expect from your adversaries.


Your teammates will try to respect your orders given before the game and help you as much as they can. But the solution found is far from perfection. The game fails to give you the control of the players who would give the most in a given situation and you will sometimes watch as the chosen player who is under your control is far away from the action and that your other team members try to steal the ball or advance to create a scoring situation, leaving you outside of the action.

The passing and dribbling suffered some modification. It’s now harder to pass or to pass by your opponents as easy as you did before. Your passes won’t always find their target player; you will have to exhaust your players in order to catch the ball before the opposing team does. Depending on the level of difficulty used, this will be easy or hard for you to accomplish but as the difficulty increases, most of the times this will cost you a goal.
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Gameplay: 76


The game gives you plenty of opportunities to play a quality football. Too bad that several features were taken straight from PS2 and not modified to match the PC.  All in all, Winning Eleven 2007 still has the PES backbone but lots of things changed, at least for the PC version.

Graphics: 74


Because the game is a PS2 port, the graphics look awful. If you can’t play the game on a higher resolution, you will witness a year 2000 graphics, with nothing worthy to catch your eyes.  From this point of view, I must say that EA managed to bring a better graphic quality to this year’s FIFA.
 
Sound:  68


The sound is fair and brings the game down. You can’t hear the public, only a mumbling and the commentary hurts your ears; they could have put more work into it.
 
Multiplayer:N/A


We haven’t been able to take part in any games so we don’t know what the game’s capable of.
 
Hardware: 76


If you don’t own a gamepad, you will have a hard time enjoying the game. The controls are scattered, you can’t play the game as you should. Probably it was hard to implement a different control scheme from the PS2 version. The frame rate is pretty good and only one or two times I experienced frame drops; however you can experience some annoying screen tearing even if you enable vsync – and that is unacceptable considering the framerate is very high all the time.