eFootball Kick-Off! Switch 2 review: old PES magic and a proper single-player mode

eFootball Kick-Off! is Konami's first football game on a Nintendo platform since Pro Evolution Soccer 2013 on Wii, fourteen years ago. But this isn't a straight port of the eFootball you'd find on PS5 or PC — it's a fundamentally different product built almost entirely around offline play, while the main eFootball on other platforms is a live service game focused heavily on online modes.

The centrepiece is World Tour, a mode exclusive to the Switch 2 version. You start with a squad of average players — long-time PES fans will immediately clock the old Master League roster, including Castolo and Minanda — and travel across regional groups of five club teams, picking one player from each team you beat. Winning matches also earns you Forward, Midfielder, Defender, and Goalkeeper currencies to spend in the Hall of Players, where you can eventually recruit legends like Beckham, Adriano, and Dennis Bergkamp. It's not a revolutionary concept, but for PES veterans who've watched the series go almost entirely online for half a decade, a lengthy single-player mode with clear progression is genuinely welcome. There's also an International Cup mode timed neatly for June, with default groups mirroring the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2026 draw — Scotland alongside Brazil, Haiti, and Morocco; England with Croatia, Panama, and Ghana. Local multiplayer supports one to four players including GameShare, and both World Tour and International Cup can be played co-op, with per-player assist options to keep mixed-skill groups from falling apart.

Konami's football lineage on Nintendo goes back decades, from Konami Hyper Soccer on NES through International Superstar Soccer on SNES, then ISS Pro Evolution, Pro Evolution Soccer, and finally the shift to free-to-play eFootball in September 2021. That original eFootball launch was widely mocked as a disaster, but five years of continuous updates have turned it around — Konami recently claimed one billion downloads across all platforms. The Switch 2 version sidesteps the live service model entirely, which cuts out the online depth but delivers something the main game lacks: a real single-player campaign.

On the pitch, the game plays well, which matters given where eFootball started in 2021. World Tour isn't a full Master League revival — there's no player training, just squad rotation — but it's the most substantial offline PES experience in years, and that counts for something.