Often when talking about football games, you find yourself explaining how matches tend to pan out. About which areas the game focussed. Is this year’s PES about retaining possession? Neat interplay? Pace? Power? Through-balls? Wing-play?

The brilliant thing about PES 2016 is that it can be about all of those things and none of them. The football here is unpredictable and undefinable. Matches take on their own personality, depending on who is playing, both on the pitch and behind the controller. You are given enough control and room for expression that you don’t need to conform to best practice. Instead you need to play to your and your team’s strengths, negating the opponent’s and managing the tempo of a game.

If you are a less glamourous team with limited talents, maybe you’ll resort to long balls towards your hefty number nine, roughing it up in the midfield and disrupting the flow of more illustrious opposition. If you’re technically more gifted, you’ll stretch opponents with neat passing and dribbling to tire them out. It works both ways, if you’re up against an average team with a superstar winger, you can double up defence and cut off supply lines, crowd out loan strikers, or pack the defence against a fearsome forward line. Tactics and game management have never been as important in a football game and, whatever approach you take, PES 2016 is always a pleasure to play. Consistently surprising and constantly thrilling.

Explaining why it’s so good is tricky not because its mechanics aren’t transparent, quite the opposite, but because PES is made up of dozens of technical triumphs. Nothing so exciting it can go on the back of the box, but a cumulative effort that makes everything tick on the pitch. If you have to zone in on anything specific, though, it is the physics and AI. Everything feels entirely independent and dynamic. A potentially risky strategy given that open-ended physics can often result in comical, head-over-heels disasters, but here it feels natural and ‘correct’.

Jostling for the ball is as much about positioning yourself as it is about timing your button presses, with players able to shuffle away from minimal contact. The ball, meanwhile, bobbles convincingly off knees and ankles when players come together. You need to be smart about charging into challenges as you have no idea where that ball could end up if you’re simply clattering into an opponent. Instead it’s about watching and manoeuvring, waiting for a heavy touch and moving your body in to nick the ball away clean.

It’s not just in the midfield scraps either. Shots can cannon anywhere, even if it’s smacking off the bar and then in off the back of the keeper’s head. Passes need to be shaped and considered. Crosses can cause chaos, with defenders able to nudge forwards trying to attack the ball to knock them off balance, but attackers free to move into open space. There are no elastic bands tying markers to your striker, or gravitational pull towards the goalkeeper. And if there is any sneaky automation in place to balance out attack and defence, it is brilliantly obfuscated.

The feeling, then, is one of complete control mixed with the clobbering chaos of football itself. You can’t account for unlucky bounces, but everything else feels under your influence, aided by a simple control system. The input delay on some passes from last year’s game has also been eradicated. This gives an excellent sense of moment-to-moment rhythm, with each individual battle having its own character. This is bolstered by players’ having their own identity. While PES Productions puts the expected focus on superstars playing like their real-life counterparts (football fans will recognise Arjen Robben’s spring-heeled zip or Cristiano Ronaldo’s preening lope from a mile off), the individuality extends to each player’s skill-set. You have to consider what type of player you are using or facing up to across the whole pitch. You know you’re unlikely to win an aerial duel or battle of strength with Vincent Kompany, but maybe you can take advantage of his average pace and tendency to step up early to nip the ball around him. Players like Ronaldo, Messi and Neymar seem to have the ball surgically attached to their feet which, like in reality, make them almost unplayable. But you need to figure them out as best you can, doubling-up and even dabbling in the dark arts of tactical fouling.

All of this sounds so obvious, but has never been achieved in a football game to this level. Games are now almost as much about strategy as they are skill, with you using substitutions to change the rhythm of the game as much as maintaining fitness levels. Though tiredness becomes a clear factor, too, with nippy wingers coming off the bench to terrorise tiring full-backs. The AI plays along too, with teammates making clever runs (whether overlapping on the wings or peeling away from markers in the box) and AI opponents managing games much as they would in real life. Find yourself 2-1 down against the computer with five minutes to go, and you can expect them to start looking for the corners and wasting time.

There are areas for improvement, of course. Referees are overly lenient, with even clattering slide tackles drawing fouls only some of the time. One suspects this is deliberate, with the developer wanting to keep games flowing, but it does seem to swing to a jarring extremity. There’s also the odd issue with queued actions: when you press a button in anticipation of the ball arriving to feet, the action is reserved just a little too long. This can occasionally inhibit your ability to change tack at the last second, or a button pressed in the heat of the midfield battle can send a wayward pass pootling off for a throw-in when the ball eventually breaks free. I’d also like to see more fizz in the ball physics to take away a smidge of floatiness. But we’re delving deep into the realm of nitpicking here, otherwise the line is simple: this is the best representation of football on-the-pitch that we’ve ever had.

Off it, familiar PES foibles remain, but there are notable strides in some areas. The lack of Premier League licensing is a given, but you can now paste images onto kits and import badges in the edit mode. This means that with a zip file from the clever clogs at PESWorld and a little bit of effort, you can have your English teams kitted out in the appropriate garb. It’s always churlish to grizzle about lack of authentic kits in PES --that’s simply the realities of football’s complex licensing deals—but with deals with Serie A, La Liga, Eredivisie and others, plus the tools to tart up other teams, PES largely has you covered. More cause for complaint is that the team rosters are, even a few weeks after launch, woefully out of date. The default squads are from the end of last season and while you get updated teams when playing online, Konami has said the update file for offline modes isn’t coming until 29 October.

It’s an irritant, and seems a rather unnecessary stick to be beaten with, but will be fixed. Whether you’ll want to hold off on your Master League until then will be up to you, but the game’s main single-player career has had some neat upgrades. It’s mainly a presentational overhaul that makes for a more involved season, with news tickers and player comments, but there’s a few nips and tucks in terms of tactics, transfers and player relationships that makes the whole thing just that little bit more involved.

Online has seen similar incremental improvement. MyClub, PES’s alternative to FIFA’s player-collecting Ultimate Team, has taken a step forward with increased player affinity upgrades and the ability to use surplus players as ‘trainers’ to upgrade match-day squad members. The netcode is far more solid too, with matches for both MyClub and the more straightforward Online Divisions easy to find and largely lag-free.

These tertiary and technical improvements are important, even if there is still some way to go in terms of presentation. But PES 2016 excels where it matters most: on the pitch. Providing a smart, strategic, thrilling and unpredictable game of football.