In previous football games, trapping a ball was a binary action—press a button, receive the ball. In PES 2017, the contextual nature of the first touch changed everything. A bad pass under pressure would result in a heavy, realistic touch. A perfect through-ball could be killed instantly, or—using the right stick—knocked past a defender in one fluid motion. This injected a level of improvisation and skill gap that FIFA struggled to match.

While the PS4 version ran on the new Fox Engine with advanced lighting, cloth physics, and dynamic weather, the PC version felt visually sterile. Stadiums lacked the atmospheric depth, player faces were noticeably less detailed, and the lighting engine lacked the "global illumination" that made night matches on console look spectacular. For PC players with high-end graphics cards, this felt like a deliberate downgrade.

8.5/10 (with mods: 9.5/10)

If you want a plug-and-play football sim, the vanilla PES 2017 on Steam is a rough experience due to the ugly default graphics and fake kits. However, if you are willing to spend an hour installing a modern community patch (like VirtuaRED or Dream Patch ), PES 2017 on PC transforms into arguably the best simulation football game of the late 2010s.

However, to call it a "bad" port would be inaccurate. It was merely a conservative one. The PC version ran buttery smooth on almost any hardware, requiring far less power than its competitors. If you were playing on a laptop or a mid-range desktop from 2014, PES 2017 was a dream to run. Here is the crucial saving grace: Despite the graphical gulf, the core gameplay on PC was identical to its PS4 cousin. Konami did not mess with the physics engine. This meant that PC players finally got access to the single greatest leap in PES history: Real Touch .