Championship Manager 5 Review

By Kristan Reed Published 1 April, 2005

A game of two halves: the bits that work and the bits that don't.

Version tested: PC

Order yours now from Simply Games.

'Championship Manager 5' Screenshot 1

Forget three. Five is the magic number. Five Alive, Jackson Five, England 5 Germany 1, Five Live, The Famous Five, Ben Folds Five, Hawaii Five-O, Championship Manager 5. Actually, let's Take Five from this list, the cracks are beginning to show.

After our rather controversial Football Manager review where we somewhat emotionally slammed Eidos' plans to carry on the ChampMan brand without the game's creators, you might imagine a sour level of bias attached to this review, but not so. Yes, it's abundantly clear that we love Sports Interactive's efforts and wanted to rally behind its cause, but that doesn't mean we weren't prepared to give Beautiful Game Studios a fair crack of the whip. We just somewhat justifiably felt that continuing with the treasured brand name was maybe exploiting the less informed gamers out there, but that doesn't mean that it was impossible for BGS to create a game that addressed some of CM's shortcomings - but it was always a tall order.

The plan all along was to create a footy management sim that retained the depth of old but managed to make the experience less daunting to the newcomer and sped up the rather tardy process. To a large extent BGS has succeeded in doing so but has shot itself in the foot by releasing something which is painfully unfinished, full of bugs and features that evidently required a lot more polish and road testing than they've had.

A solid performance

'Championship Manager 5' Screenshot 2

The basis of CM5 is actually surprisingly solid. After last summer's fairly embarrassing public unveiling (complete with "errr, whoops" 14-3 scorelines) the finished article is by some measure better than most of us expected. To the untrained eye it actually looks very good indeed. A bit like that promising youth prospect that comes off the bench every now and then, shakes things up, scores a late late winner and suddenly gets an unexpected run in the first eleven. But as we all know, exposed to the full ninety that promising flush of youth can often turn into an error strewn performance that rattles their confidence for good.

Apologies for the somewhat tedious analogy, but it does, sadly, apply to the rebirth of ChampMan. Forced to code the game from the ground up, BGS' efforts bare the hallmarks of all version 1.0s; good intentions, some great ideas on paper, but the net result is that the more you play it the more the game delivers its own unique brand of yellow card offences, blatant dives, own goals and gaffs appear to sully the suspension of disbelief. Rumour has it that a UEFA investigation is pending and a severe punishment is expected to be handed out, possibly banishing BGS to the stands and preventing them from conducting team talks and issuing instructions to the players during games. To be fair, the new signings tried their best, but the harsh truth is that they haven't had the time to gel and get used to the system and it's inevitable that mistakes were going to be made. As Hansen would say, you'll never win anything with kids.

To rewind slightly, BGS felt that getting hold of ChampMan would give it the chance to do something that Sports Interactive never really did. While SI essentially kept on revising what it had to the point where some fans felt it was becoming a bit of a bloated, behemoth of a game that proved too daunting for newcomers, BGS wanted to strip it down and almost reinvent it to become a more inclusive experience that hid away the layers of complexity and turned it into a game that was radically faster than before. The buzzword was "constant gameplay"; a lynchpin feature that enabled players to carry on navigating various parts of the game even when it was busy working out Copa America results and the endless number crunching that goes on behind the scenes.

Out of the traps

'Championship Manager 5' Screenshot 3

In those terms, CM5 is largely a roaring success, with the general play experience markedly quicker than SI's efforts and one that delivers on allowing the player to get on with poking about while the progress bar creeps up. There is still a degree of waiting around, though, with much of what you want to do still dependent on waiting for the next day to roll around. Plus, it's not always interesting or fun to have to constantly click through endless gossip and speculation before you reach a piece of news that's relevant to your team.

Whether you'll like the front end will be largely a matter of taste and preference, and it's interesting that despite owning the "look" of CM, BGS has still gone ahead and binned it anyway, which many will deem a mistake. Ditching CM's side bar entirely - going for a Firefox-inspired pull-down, tab-based system instead, which confuses initially but is evidently a clean, navigable front end once you get used to the transition - seems to have broken more than it has fixed. While most things in the same are intuitively placed and exactly where you'd expect them to be, it seems often simply designed to irritate the player. For example, it's more than a trifle irksome to not be able to see the 2D match engine and your team's stats overview at the same time. Basic stuff like this really starts to stick in your craw after a while, as does not being able to see the player's match rating andtheir current condition at the same time. For everything BGS has done to simplify the play experience it has introduced all-new barriers at the same time.

BGS has made bold boasts about its 'improved' 2D match engine, tilting it slightly to give the impression of height in the ball, but then has made the player blobs so big relative to the scale of the pitch that it's barely possible to figure out what's going on half the time, while the match engine speed settings are either pointlessly slow or way too fast to be able to keep up with the game. Why not put a speed slider in and let the player decide for themselves how fast they want it?

Out of control

'Championship Manager 5' Screenshot 4

And what of the player AI? The game gives players the ability to issue a marvellous degree of customisable tactical instructions to players, but you'd be hard pressed to see any evidence of it from watching your team in action. Player runs, for example, are rarely in evidence, while sudden changes of tactics and formation make no discernable difference. It's like the placebo effect of gaming; give players a bunch of buttons to fiddle with and they feel like they're in control when they're not really. To make matters worse, a lot of the highlights seem to pick up on throw ins and free kicks way too much, while your alleged shot count mysteriously creeps up and up without there being much physical evidence of it - not that you can really see what's happening without matches taking forever to play out, anyway.

Frankly, we're more than a little puzzled with the standard of the realism in any case. Having taken charge of Norwich with the full expectation of going straight down, it seemed bizarrely easy to turn them into title contenders right from the word go, with some quite incredible results and one of the best defensive records in the land - and that's with an attacking approach too. It's the little things you begin to tire of; enormous shot counts that claim you've had 25 shots on target against top class opposition, while mediocre opponents down to nine men for much of the game prove to be the hardest opposition all season.

And for all CM5's sniggersome claims of having "accurate and impartial" Opta Index player data, why on earth do fringe players who struggle to make the starting eleven during an injury crisis end up being our star players while the real life stars seem to be rated as the reverse? Meanwhile crazy wage demands from players barely out of the youth team prevent you from sorting out contracts without bankrupting the club, while other players quickly become the subject of persistent and tiresomely repetitive transfer speculation even when you're given the chance to nip it in the bud.

Own goals and gaffs

'Championship Manager 5' Screenshot 5

The little quirks and irritations are there for all to see and will be unique to the experiences of everyone that plays it. Some players have noted, for example, that the financial status of their favourite club is completely borked, while others have spotted hilarious wage gaffs for individual players - but literally anyone who looks at a Premiership youth team will be astonished to find they have half a dozen million-pound-rated 16-year old players kicking their heels while you busily meddle with a bunch of ageing journeymen complaining about their failing Achilles.

If the general spelling errors weren't enough to remind you of how rushed CM5 is, then the sight of the board repeatedly congratulating you on "2-0 draws" or griping that your league form has to improve after a five-match unbeaten run that's taken you to second in the table will have you hooting with derision. The best yet was when an anonymous youth product, aged 16, went to the media to complain about our managerial methods. For the love of God.

Of course, it's not strictly about the mistakes. CM5 is simply not at the races when it comes to comparing features. There are numerous (albeit minor) leagues missing, there's no network gaming option, and the media involvement is basic at best. It may have a few unique features of its own, but most of them are utterly meaningless - the nine 'action zones' the prime example. For the most part CM5 just lacks attention to detail, and in a game that attracts as many obsessives as this, that's a crucial error.

A well meaning underperformer

But if you're not all that bothered about some of the fairly harmless mistakes and whether or not obscure African leagues are there or not there's still a good management game lurking in there somewhere, and it is still quite good fun, believe it or not. It's just we thought we'd left behind this sort of buggy mess around the era of ChampMan 2. Somehow, despite itself it still emerges with some credit; it's not a disaster by any means and does, in fact, have the core of a decent alternative to SI's heavyweight efforts in there. For the most part it is arguably more accessible to the newcomer; it's much quicker, does all the basic stuff reasonably proficiently, but just needed about another six months in development to realise some of its ambitions. The truth is the game was already five months late and Eidos couldn't afford to wait that long, but in bringing the game to market undercooked may have irreparably harmed the brands' chances of retaining its title of king of the footy management sims. As things stands, there's only one game in the genre worth devoting your life to, and we don't need to remind you what that is...

Order yours now from Simply Games.

6 / 10

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Picture of Kristan.

About Kristan Reed

Kristan is a former editor of Eurogamer, dad, Stone Roses bore and Norwich City supporter who sometimes mutters optimistically about Team Silent getting back together.

Read more articles from Kristan by visiting the Kristan Reed archive page.

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Comments (30) Latest comment 7 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • ssuellid #1 7 years ago

    Maybe they targetted the game at you Krudster? Tweaked the review copy to be nice to Norwich. ;)

  • Dire #2 7 years ago

    its pure grade A crap

  • Master Cheif #3 7 years ago

    LOL i agree went to Game Stars Live last year a guy was playing away and didnt realise that 2 of his players were sent off

  • #4 7 years ago

    Chavionship manager 5

  • Tabasco #5 7 years ago

    Aye better now guys ;op

  • ERG1008 #6 7 years ago

    Ray Parlour at Arsenal?
    I think you'll find he plays for my beloved Middlesbrough & indeed went there in July 2004.
    Is Rooney still at Everton?

    How many patches did SI use on CM4 to make it playable? Remember the players having no history, etc on release?
    I'm a big SI fan, love FM2005 but surely CM5 has to be given time?

  • krudster #7 7 years ago

    I played with the patch, so any problems I found are post-patch.

  • wattoo #8 7 years ago

    "griping that your league form has to improve after a five-match unbeaten run that's taken you to second in the table will have you hooting with derision."

    How often are these problems occuring? I've seen a lot of these things happens in SI Champ Man games

  • krudster #9 7 years ago

    Semi regularly. They're not game breakers, but just examples of sloppiness.

  • marilena #10 7 years ago

    Acusing CM5 of bugs seems rather cheeky to me, seeing that you didn't mind them in FM2005 and the other CM games.

  • FWB #11 7 years ago

    I lost all faith in the series after CM4. The buggiest game I've ever had the misfortune to play and with every patch came new problems. Never played a playable version. No surprises the same is happening with CM5. Such a shame that this series collapsed.

  • Celeborn #12 7 years ago

    Yeah previous CM games have been buggy, but FM2005 wasn't too bad (not the real "piss you off" ones like this release and previous CM releases. Perhaps we'll see a theme of Eidos controlled CMs continue to be forced out unfinished while SI Games get the time to do some more testing without so much pressure? Coz its been blatantly clear that Eidos pushes out its games before theyre finished for some cash... yet it's coz of that the Tomb Raider series lost a lot of respect and following, and it could happen here with CM too....

    I think the major problem here tho is the whole "tactics don't really change much on field". To me, this is a SHOWSTOPPER. Football management is about tactics and the results of what happens on the field! If what you tinker with doesn't really make a difference, then your not really in control of your team. And if your not really in control of your team and what they do on the pitch, whats the point in playing? Even if the rest of the game was perfect; you HAVE to get some sort of feedback on your tactics.

    And thats why FM2005 and previous CMs were well received dispite of some pretty ugly bugs. Underneath it, the feedback and reward is there. Which is what makes these games so damn addictive!

  • marilena #13 7 years ago

    Celeborn, I can't comment much without playing CM5, but I disagre with you on FM2005. It had more annying bugs at launch than CM4 had. Players were getting a crazy amount of yellow cards for protests and dives, players out of postion turned into vegetables all of the sudden, goalkeepers always kicked the ball up the park although they were supposed to give it to the defenders, man marking was completely borked...

    It was pretty bad.

    As for tactics actually working, that's true, but only partially. The big instructions mattered, but other, smaller ones, only seemed yo have the placebo effect Kristan was talking about.

    To be honest, when I read this review I see what every review of a CM/FM game should be, if reviewers were honest. But usually reviewers aren't honest, because either they fear fanboys, or are fanboys themselves.
    Edited by 1 at 01/04/05 @ 16:03

  • marcduffy #14 7 years ago

    marilena : I think your memory is playing tricks on you if you think that about FM2005 compared to CM4

  • BritShix #15 7 years ago

    Way too many football analogies and metaphors for my liking. I know its a football game but there is such a thing as taking it too far!!!

  • BritShix #16 7 years ago

    Quote: "Somehow, despite itself it still emerges with some credit; it's not a disaster by any means"

    Well it sounds like a complete disaster. Avoid at all costs. Serves Eidos right. HA HA...

  • immateriaux #17 7 years ago

    krudster,

    I said your FM2005 review stunk to high heaven and was very annoyed with how you pre-empted CM5's release with your comments but fair dues that seems to me like a very fair review overall. I'd mostly agree with it all - bar perhaps that I like having them 9 zones things instead of three. But it really did need at least another six months... (really strange too, as you said, that they decided to drop the traditional CM interface? Can't explain that decision at all)

  • Sid-Nice #18 7 years ago

    Krudster Wrote: I played with the patch, so any problems I found are post-patch.

    How many patches did you wear when you reviewed Fifa Street?

  • caligari #19 7 years ago

    Well well well...so Krudster is a fellow Norwich-ster. JEEZ Krudster, why not give the guys a full low down on this 'Fine City' instead of looking at sub-standard games (a big shout out to crappy game stores such as One Step Beyond, Swallow and Second Hand Land)?

    And admit it, there is no way that Dean Ashton is going to stick with City 'when' they go down. GAWD, listen to me. I pretend to hate football, because of its associations with 'chavs', 'geezers' and 'pie swillers'...but really it's...errr...Great.

  • Bumbuliuz #20 7 years ago

    Worst game Ever!! ;) I decided to give Cm5 a try. After 1 season I have uninstalled and given up. First game with man u. Lost 1-0 against Rotherdam. Next game lost against W.b.a 3-0. Won a few games and lost some in shocking numbers. Saw to many 9-0 games being played by the A.I. The scoring line is unrealistic and too high. Along with so many other bugs. Given 6+ month og .dev time it could have been a 85% game maybe. Now wonder why Pc Zone Crucified the game

  • praetorian #21 7 years ago

    It doesn't make sense to me to release the game near the end of the season. Why not take the 4 months the developers obviously need to iron out the bugs and release it in August in anticipation of the new season?

    I was annoyed that as manager of Chavski, I was unable to buy Robinho (who had better stats than Drogba and Gudjohnsen) because the board deemed it an unrealistic transfer (he was worth £10m and I offered £18m). Mmm, I can just see Roman Abramovich now... "Da, I know he's the best player to come out of South America since Ronaldinho, but £18 million is a bit much..."

  • Dire #22 7 years ago

    It doesn't make sense to me to release the game near the end of the season. Why not take the 4 months the developers obviously need to iron out the bugs and release it in August in anticipation of the new season?

    What do you expect from Eidos? like hell they would give a game a few extra months for some more QA to get rid of bugs.

    Its also a trend that is happening more and more over the last few years. KOTOR" & Vamp: Bloodlines are the last two i can think of which could've done with a few more months to fix bugs.

    sad state of affairs we gamers live in at the moment.

  • Bumbuliuz #23 7 years ago

    All of my scouts said that both Joaquim and Robinho were not good enough for man u. Wft!!!! Bull

  • Fozzie_bear #24 7 years ago

    All of my scouts said that both Joaquim and Robinho were not good enough for man u. Wft!!!! Bull

    They got the AI for man utd scouts spot on then! Must be the same guys who told fergie that kleberson, djemba-djemba and forlan were good enough for utd.

  • posh_geordie #25 7 years ago

    Post deleted at 18:45:04 02-01-2012

  • Fozzie_bear #26 7 years ago

    Quite right noglet. I got cm4 but gave up with it and returned to CM 01/02. Since i'm happy with that one i've not bought any of the recent updates (03/04 or FM2005). I used to get every new CM on day of release. No longer bother.

  • blablabla #27 7 years ago

    Well........duh

  • Stickman #28 7 years ago

    Surely anyone who's going to buy a footie management sim already has done, when they snapped up FM2005? Why have 2? IMO this was always going to be the inferior product, it's just funny that it's been released THIS late and THIS buggy! Good work Eidos.

  • SingerenBsAs #29 7 years ago

    This game SUCKS. Football Manager totally OWNS it!

  • ilduce #30 7 years ago

    More the same ...Lots of buggs and unplayable nothing new...
    One thing that could be safe the 2d match.