Studs Up

How do you review a game that you’ve played every single year since you were 12 years old? Well if that game is Football Manager 2010, you review it immediately and for about 72 consecutive hours.

I didn’t mean to, it just sorta… happened… as it tends to do with FM. The fine folks at SEGA were nice enough to send a complimentary copy my way and at about midnight I decided to open it and play “just an hour or so” to see if this new iteration was as good as previous.

Come 5am, I was in bad shape. Eyes sore, mouth dry, but wide awake and in absolutely no mood to go to bed. It’s hard to review this game by going into details, you can find them all over the official site which is flush with updates, patches and a vibrant forum community, and in reality FM is a game that goes through changes in occasional re-writes of the entire platform. FM has many improvements, especially to the layout and User Interface, over last year’s version but once you get used to those there is a pleasant sense of familiarity as you really get stuck in.

After just over a week of non-stop playing, this version of FM has revealed numerous little additions that add up to a nicely upgraded experience. For a lifelong player, the small things are important. More media options, more interaction options, just more depth and breadth to the game world.

Importantly for me, the Tactics screens have been completely redone and upgraded. You can now set your team up using a series of “Basic” or “Advanced” options. Basic lets you set players to common stereotypes like “Winger”, “Wide Midfielder”, “Target Man”, “Poacher” or my favourite “Deep Lying Midfielder”. The game then sets their individual instructions as it deems appropriate and, of course, you can edit these anyway by flipping to the “Advanced” screen. A number of new options are there as well, Forward Runs have been replaced by Runs From Deep and, finally, you can ask wide men to Cut In. Brilliant. I spent a good 3-4 hour span building my ideal formation (a fluid 4-4-2 with two DMs, two wide attacking midfielders flanked by attacking fullbacks).

After a good week and a half of putting in a few hours a day (or more… *cough) I’m really delighted with the changes that the developers have made. I have a slight case of OCD when it comes to video games, always wanting to build the perfect avatar, player or set up and thus I’ve restarted my FM game about 6 times so far after learning about X new feature or Y new option halfway through a season.

I think I’ve just about got it now where I can start “clean” and feel like I’m playing the game to its maximum from day 1, but we’ll see how that goes on season 3 when they some other new feature pops up that I didn’t expect, leaving me simultaneously angry and delighted.

FM is available from, like, everywhere. So go geddit.