This year’s best football game costs just £16 and skips microtransactions
Key Points
- Konami's eFootball Kick-Off, the return of the Pro Evolution Soccer series, launched on Nintendo Switch 2 on 3 June 2026 for £15.99.
- The game has no microtransactions, with World Tour Coins earned through play rather than bought, in contrast to FIFA / EA FC's Ultimate Team model.
- It trades visual polish and full licensing for a smooth 60 FPS and a single-player and couch co-op focus.
- Modes include World Tour, where you sign players from beaten clubs, and an International Cup that recreates the four-yearly world tournament with the correct groups.
- Online multiplayer offers solid matchmaking and tighter, more technical matches than recent FIFA games.
Konami surprised us by releasing eFootball Kick-Off on the Nintendo Switch 2 last week for £15.99, and after 10 hours, I think it is the most fun I have had with a football game in years.
The game is the latest entry in a series formerly known as Pro Evolution Soccer, the PES franchise that spent the best part of a decade in the wilderness while EA’s FIFA, now EA FC, ran the genre largely unopposed. I downloaded it on a whim, mostly because of the price, and walked away a convert.
I played FIFA religiously for years. Somewhere along the way the football stopped being the point. Each new edition leaned harder into Ultimate Team, the card-collecting mode built around packs, coins and a permanent nudge towards spending real money, and my interest drained away in proportion. The matches felt secondary to the store. eFootball Kick-Off is, in almost every respect, the opposite proposition.
What £15.99 actually buys
This is a budget release, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is not as visually impressive as the EA FC games, and the licensing is thin, so do not expect every kit, crest and stadium to be present and correct.
What it does instead is run at a silky 60 frames per second and feel genuinely good in the hands, which counts for far more once you are actually playing.
The focus is squarely on single-player and couch co-op rather than monetised online progression. The standout for me is World Tour, where you build your own club and travel the globe taking on other teams.
Beat a side and you get to poach one of their players, which turns every fixture into a small heist and keeps the squad-building loop ticking without a shop in sight. The Coins you earn to sign legendary players come from playing, not from your bank card.
There is also a dedicated ‘International Cup’, Konami’s recreation of the four-yearly global showpiece, and it ships with the correct groups intact of this year’s World Cup, so you can run through a full tournament with the real draw.
A pair of mini-games, the three-on-three Wall Ball and a dribbling-based Obstacle Race, round out the package for shorter sessions.
The online game surprised me most
I went in expecting the multiplayer to be an afterthought, and it is the part that surprised me most.
Matchmaking has been surprisingly decent, and the games themselves are far tighter and more technical than I remember FIFA being.
These are hard-fought 1-0 and 2-1 affairs decided by positioning and patience rather than pace abuse, which is exactly the kind of football the PES name used to stand for.
Worth it, with one caveat
Ten hours in, I have comfortably had more than my money’s worth.
There is no guarantee Konami leaves it alone and resists bolting on microtransactions further down the line, and that is worth keeping an eye on given the company’s free-to-play eFootball habits elsewhere.
For now, though, this is the most I have enjoyed a football game in a long time, and proof that there is still something special in the PES formula.
