This all might sound overwhelmingly negative, so it’s important to stress that the basics of Football Manager are still there and working as well as ever. Football de-arte isn’t everything, but after a few hours of FM15’s muscular physicality I found myself longing for the silky skills of my old Everton team. FM14 was the football of coffee house intellectuals, FM15 plays like a lager lout. At its best, Football Manager reflects the state of modern football, but these tactics are straight out of 1998.Ĭontrast this to FM14, where players were playing gorgeous passing football and experimenting with avante-garde strikerless formations while holding discussions about ‘verticality’. I started the game fantasising about being Brendan Rodgers or Joachim Low, but I ended up playing like Tony Pulis. But it does seem a bit strange in a world where all the major teams are all using inverted wingers and diamond formations for old fashioned touchline hugging wingers to be so dominant. If you do, you’ll probably like FM15’s decidedly retro approach. Now you, dear reader, may love long ball football, you may delight in old fashioned wing play. I’d say two thirds of my goals came from crosses, and the rest from long balls over the top. Get enough balls into the box and you will probably win. Target men and traditional wingers are in vogue in a way not seen since the early 2000s. But there’s a significant pattern to this year’s efforts: crosses are everything. The way it works is so deliberately, wonderfully opaque that players tend to treat it like a force of nature rather than something that has ever actually been designed. Veteran players may chafe at having to unlearn years of bad habits but trust me, it’s worth it. Some changes are clear reactions to how players use the game, like moving the much used quicksearch bar front and centre, while others try subtly influence them, like combining the player search and scout sections to encourage you to use your staff. It’s not only pretty, but includes some smart decisions. As with each instalment of the game, Football Manager gets better than the last, and when you’re already the greatest football management game out, that’s a winning combination.The UI is a genuine improvement. Yet this expansiveness will naturally turn many away, and if long-term, large-scale, management simulation games aren’t for you, then you should avoid at all costs. Never will you feel like you’re clicking ‘Next’ just for the sake of it. You can spend weeks and weeks playing a single season of Football Manager and forever be learning something. Pro's: Highly configurable, huge replay-ability, the best football management game out there.Ĭon's: Requires a lot of time invested into it, 3D game play is lacking.Ĭonclusion: Football Manager offers a level of realism, professionalism and depth that many video games simply could never offer. This is a game dedicated to the management, strategy and simulation side of football, and while there are 3D games to watch, the matches themselves are entirely lacking when lined up alongside other football game series. It is important to note, to those unfamiliar with the Football Manager series, that this is not your typical football sports game like the Fifa or Pro Evolution Soccer series. These are games that you invest your time in, and Football Manager – with its new features, larger database of players and clubs, and more interactive game play – is no exception. The Football Manager series is known to go on for weeks and even if you were rushing through a season, it’d still take quite a few hours. You start the game at the beginning of the football year, choose your player, choose your strategy and make all the decisions every budding Alex Ferguson might think of. In Football Manager, you take the position of – you guessed it – a football manager. Football Manager, like its predecessors – either in the Championship Manager form or the rebranded Football Manager series – is a fantastic backroom, strategy and management football game.
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