Football Manager 2005 Review

You'll never click alone

As always seem to be the case whenever SI turns out a new game, it goes ever further than ever before. More teams, more players, more leagues. You get the picture. But there's only so far you can run with that before even fans of the game's eyes begin to glaze over. The changes are, as they've always been, are genuine improvements born out of feedback from the enormous community. Probably one of the most passionately involved communities around; people who would - and do - work for nothing just to make the game better. How else do you suppose 51 league countries, 158 divisions and 5300 playable teams have made it into the game without a little help from their friends? It's a mind boggling task but in some respects a fairly meaningless set of statistics - or they would be if the game underneath wasn't top quality.

What on Earth is there to say about the game that hasn't been pondered over a gazillion times before? It's an intensely personal experience. Every single FM game (or campaign is probably more accurate) you play will be different to the next, and utterly unique to the individual. There are so many potential permutations that it's probably easier to contemplate how big space is that figure out how many possibilities there are in FM.

But while it's possibly one of the biggest, most bloated games ever made, with more statistical depth than your average corporate company tax audit, it's important to emphasise this isn't a game to be scared of. You grow with it, it grows with you. It's the ultimate elastic gaming experience that shrinks to fit, or expands to obese proportions if you let it. The beauty of it, is it's all up to you. Scared of the prospect of nursing your Youth Development through their spotty teens? Then just ignore it; hand the role to someone else and simply get on with whatever it is you want. If you can't be bothered spending 10 minutes picking your first team and deciding on their latest training regime, then leave it to the coaches. It's fine.

Okay, so most of what we've written so far could apply to any of the last handful of CMs, right? So what's new? Well, there's only so much you can add to a football management game without getting into the realms of Total Club Manager's novelty territory; surely it's about the team and only about the team? That was certainly the mantra before, but the biggest addition to the role of management is the increasing role of the boss as front man. The buffer between the club and the players and the media, and your fellow professionals. As we've all seen - especially in the football mentalist countries such as here in the UK and in Italy - the media obsession and involvement in the game is often bordering on unnerving. It can turn previously sane men into gibbering wrecks if things go awry and affect the entire outcome of a season. Messrs Fergie and Wenger are masters of the art and do all they can to instil psychological damage into their opponents when the going gets tough - much to the general amusement to the rest of us.

A football RPG?

In Football Manager these media-lead tussles are split into two, the heavily trailered Manager Mind Games and the general media approaches. You know the type - the ones that try and goad you into snapping back over the (lack of) expectations surrounding the club. Throw in the odd bit of player input and the occasional comment from the board and it's a game that's about so much more than the basic transfer and tactics sim that it was built on. As has been pointed out, it's taking the concept of management and steadily moving it into Role Playing Game territory, and it's all the better because of it.

Manager Mind Games in particular gives players a real chance to create their own personality; a personality that - over time - affects the type of players you're able to sign. If you're always nice and compliment your rivals, some players might respond well to the level of respect you have for others, but on the other hand, being a soft touch could be counter productive. The wonderful part of Football Manager is sussing out for yourself how to behave. Your general gut instinct is to be the nice guy, make everyone happy - but is that really what's required? Sometimes you just don't really know one way or the other what's working and what isn't - but adding a layer of mystery somewhat unravels the cold clinical formula for success that the previous games used to have.

One of the other new additions - the addition of Physioroom's input is fine, and it's certainly welcome to have more realistic and detailed info on what's happening, but it's not as if it makes a significant difference one way or the other to the game. Ultimately you'll soon settle into a pattern of playing the game that soon feels very familiar - an all-too familiar feeling of 'just one more match' or 'just to finish scouring for cheap foreign left wingers'. That endlessly compelling feeling that you're missing out on something. It really does never end, and that's where the trouble starts. The addiction. The compulsion to try and build and conquer and clean up. Next to other games, there's really nothing quite so maddeningly compulsive as a few solid weeks playing nothing but this.

Fit again

Now in its third code revision since the buggy CM4 emerged, perhaps the happiest thing to report is how slick the whole playing experience is. Throughout the review session we alt tabbed between the game and the desktop, continuing our work while the game sat suspended in the background, sneaking a quick go here and there when the opportunity arose. Not once did the game freak out, and even on a relatively underpowered Centrino laptop it ran fast and smooth without crippling the machine's resources. Admittedly we didn't bother weighing the game down with too many concurrent leagues, but that's just the way we wanted to play it. The chance are if you feel the need to run multiple leagues at once you'll have the kit to run that; we don't see that as important, and for the purposes of what we wanted to do it ran like a dream.

There's no such thing as a review of Football Manager. Much like a role playing game, there's often hundreds of hours of play to go through before you can experience it properly. We wouldn't assume to have seen all there is to see. Perhaps in this game no one ever will, but that's all part of the enigma, and why we insist on coming back for more, because it's all about proving yourself over and over again. It's tough - certainly more challenging than we ever remember it, deep, complex, yet intuitive enough to not frighten off those still contemplating what the fuss is all about. The interface is marvellous, in fact.

But is it perfect? No, of course not. A game as complex and multi faceted as football always provides room for tweaks and additions, and there's always a wish list to wade through before anyone would be truly one hundred per cent satisfied; 3D match engine, dynamic spoken match commentary, and a FIFA/TCM-style integration with a fully playable football game. PES combined with FM, anyone? It's a dream combination, for sure.