Games News: Football Manager 2014 – review

Football Manager 2014: as fickle as the real game

It's January 2015 and my four-year plan to take Swindon Town to the Premier League isn't going so well. We're mired in a League One relegation dogfight, the players are injured or knackered, and every day an ex-pro, rival manager or snarky journalist publicly reminds everybody I'm under pressure. I'm hauled before the board and hold onto my job only by promising 10 points from the next five games, an all-but-impossible feat given the fixture list and rock-bottom morale. It's then that Nile Ranger knocks on my door and says he's better than Swindon and wants out. I want to sing "go go Nile Ranger" to the Power Rangers theme tune, but I need his goals and tell him he's going nowhere. "I'm not at all happy with how you've handled this," he says, storming out, and a day later a story is leaked to the press that I've lost the dressing room. A month later, I'm toast.

I was expecting a terrific tactical simulation from Sport's Interactive's latest offering – and it is – but I was surprised to find it's also akin to a crude Telltale adventure game you could call The Walking Damned United. Interactions with press, players and staff have featured before, but never with this sophistication. From asking your captain to have a quiet word with a sulking striker, to rebuking a fellow manager for failing to give your loanee youngster first team football as agreed, the possibilities are vast. There's no headline-grabbing improvement in 2014 to match last year's Classic mode – discounting Linux support and cloud saves – but it's these dealings that define its character.

Football Manager 2014: tactics

Media relations are significantly spruced up and you'll be asked more varied questions, your responses ranging from calm to animated. While fieriness can be fun, it makes managerial progression much harder, like adopting evil-alignment in an RPG or being Paolo Di Canio. Play the media's game and you can build relationships with individual journalists, making them more susceptible to your car window patter on transfer deadline day. The latter now appears in Classic mode and captures brilliantly the day's absurd countdown, with you failing to get players you should have got cheaply a month ago owing to paperwork not being completed on time. The only thing missing is a running commentary from Jim "Two Phones" White.

Still, dealings with the media remain imperfect. You can be asked the same question, worded slightly differently, three times in a row. While this is indeed what real press conferences can be like, the unintentional satire isn't fun to play. At other times, the questions bear no relation to reality. A week after a defender made two individual errors that led directly to goals, I'm asked to explain the secret of his "great form". Likewise, there's a lack of context to the pronouncements others make. A week that sees a local derby in the Capital One Cup on Tuesday followed by the same fixture in the league on Saturday produces identikit reactions from players and pundits before each game.

Football Manager 2014: transfer deadline day

Such frustrations are noticeable because the developers have done a great job of cutting them elsewhere. Your newly colour-coded inbox allows you to prioritise and deal with almost every issue from a single screen, which frees you up to focus on the important matters like why your corners hit the first defender every single time. Tactics are filtered through one unified system, with sliders replaced by a raft of more realistic instructions and expanded player roles. The latter go far beyond the traditional playmaker/ball winner axis, but there are decent descriptions of the false nine or enganche provided in case you don't have Inverting the Pyramid to hand. Feedback from your staff is better than ever, with star ratings indicating a player's proficiency in any given role, and during matches your assistant will offer a running commentary of suggestions which can be implemented with a single click. These mostly make sense but there's an occasional disconnect between the proposal and intended outcome. Accepting the advice that "we need to get more shots on target" translates to "work ball into box" for example, which might go against your core match plan.

Such discrepancies are amplified by the match engine, which remains the least satisfying aspect of the series. Nobody expects Fifa 13 presentation, but you do hope for a better translation of your tactics to the engine. It generally works well but errors are glaring. One particular bugbear was defenders standing off opponents no matter how many times I screamed at them to mark tightly and get stuck in. On the umpteenth occasion a striker ran unimpeded through the heart of my defence to score I nearly quit-out in frustration. Still, for the other times when everything comes together, you can now create and export custom highlights packages.

Football Manager 2014: match report

Of course, if those in-depth features aren't your thing then Classic mode returns in improved form. The developers have wisely avoided adding many more features, concentrating instead on making the pared-down experience respond better to your choices. You can now create detailed plans for instant matches, explicitly stating when subs should be made and how your team should react to different eventualities. This makes using the instant result button less of a lottery should you choose to power through a season in an evening.

It's no longer a straight shoot between the simplicity of Classic mode and a behemoth, however. Play the standard career and you start by sitting down with your assistant to flesh out precisely which aspects of management you want to handle. If you're bored by the toil of training regimes or talking to the press gives you hives, you can entrust your number two with such distractions. If you want something compact then challenges also make a welcome reappearance and the integration of Steam Workshop should also ensure a bountiful supply of user-created content in the near future.

Football Manager 2014: negotiations with the board

Promoting his book recently, Sir Alex Ferguson kept reiterating his mantra of control. The joy of Football Manager 2014 comes in deciding precisely what aspects of management of which you want to take direct direct control, and in navigating its myriad systems to stamp your own philosophy on a club. Where it falls down, most notably with the match engine, is in those moments where your control seems inexplicably lost and the carefully constructed alternate-reality breaks. At its best, you see the fruits of your labours all too clearly. Ahead of derby day with Bristol City, I declared midfielder Stephen McLaughlin to be their weak link. He promptly volleyed home his first strike of the season to give them the win. A fun and life-absorbing game, yes, but a fickle one. In so many ways, it's like the real thing.

Reviewed on PC

Source: Theguardian. com

Readmore: Games News: Football Manager 2014 – review

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