It's great - played a game or two on it and went back to WE8 as i've got that patched really well.
After playing it for a few months now (WE8 and more recently PES4) these are my views :-
- On screen ref - basically a waste of processing power, adds authenticity but adds nothing else to the game.
- General play - smoother & more responsive than PES3 with less annoying animations that must be left to run their course before you can get a player to react.
- Corners & free kicks - harder to score from and timing needs to be more spot on than ever before - an improvement in my book as it's more realistic.
- Refs - better AI and better use of the advantage rule. Still not perfect but the best refs yet and far better than the rubbish we had in PES3 - i.e. where great tackles were penalised with Yellow cards and disgusting tackles that went unpunished! The banishing or at least greatly reducing of the silly handball rule is also a good move.
- Player AI - much improved again - players make more intellegent runs. Also player speeds have been made more realistic i.e. Henry or Owen can't just easily break away with the ball from all but the fastest midfielder or defender like they could in PES3.
- Keepers - better again - much less silly errors where keepers just let in daft goals by getting confused with defenders etc. They still do very occasionaly as in real life but not almost every game as happened in PES3. Also straight shots are saved more often so the need to work clever moves to score goals has never been greater.
- Master league - not dabbled much yet but looks much bigger & better than ever before.
- Graphics - The best yet (I disagree that they are not as good as PES3) - far more detail and better player likenesses. Also more animations help to bring the game even more to life.
All in all it replaces PES3 as the greatest Video game money can buy IMO. To put things in perspective I would gladly pay 10 times more for this game than 80% of titles that are released these days.
I can't wait for the XBox version so I can play it on Live!!