Well I have not written a review, or article for that mater, for a while. As I am a self funded reviewer, I play new games only when I can afford them. I would love to have the time as well, to look at all the latest releases but alas like most normal gamers out there I write about what I love, and what the bank manager will fund.
So to start my review let me say that places like Play and Amazon have Football Manger 2012 for £14.99. That is a good price (and a testament to the overpriced nature of console games.)
The first thing to notice is the need to register the game through Steam. I am sure the many hackers and coders of the world will devise a work around for the pesky need to pay for it, but as I said, at £14.99 I could afford to treat myself and help keep the developers fed.
I like the fact it registers through Steam. It means I only need the disk the once, hell, I don't even need that but it is cheaper than buying it through Steam itself. I can then install the Steam client on another machine and play the game there. I know I can do this with the disk, but if I am half way around the world and fancy the fix that only FM2012 can provide, then I am good to go.
The next (and I realise I am not even into the game play yet) thing I am impressed with is an idea a friend of mine had. I can't take credit for this so you can all thank this guy for the idea, (I also appreciate this has nothing to do with the actual game!) If you have a dropbox account, then you can make your dropbox folder the location for your saved games. That way you can be around the world and play the game you were playing at home, without the need of a memory stick or the disk to install the game. The web is a wonderful place! (Back off pesky piracy laws....) If you don't know about dropbox, well click here sign up and we both get a little more space to store our web based documents.
However I digress completely from the topic and nature of the review, so without any more distractions, Football Manager 2012.
I downloaded the demo from Steam, which allows you to play up till January of the first season. I chose to start unemployed and made my self an ex-international star with prospects. I turn down a few low level jobs in Germany before landing Aston Villa (and if you think this is unrealistic just wait...) I take charge of the club and am ready to look at the new features of the game. Well as always there are so many it is going to be hard to tell you about them. The good thing about FM is that you can spend as much or as little time in each menu as you want. There is the detail of setting each player on specific training regimes, conditioning and tactics. You can scout staff who will help make this easier, they will suggest the best training for each player depending on how they perform.
Scouting players and staff has become a much nicer interface with easy to use filters and getting reports on how well a player will fit into your team making it easier.
The media section has been developed (although still not perfect) allowing you to add a tone to your voice in the press encounters. You can cautiously praise an oppositions player or passionately praise your own. This also carries over to team talks, allowing you to praise or damn your team. Sometimes either way will lift their spirits and others times they look demotivated. There is a fine line you tread in the backroom with your team. It helps to have good assistant manager who can guide you to what you should say at points.
There is now also a team meeting feature. This allows you to call all your players together and fire them up or let them talk about what is bothering them. This has been quite a useful tool, but after holding a few of these, the team did say we have had a lot of team meetings. I thought that was funny, as you should surely try to bring the team together in football? What do I know?
The tactics are now even easier to use and allow you to chain up a few for the team to learn to play. This helps with consistency as changing your tactics after each match can mean that the team will have no sense of structure. There are plenty of menu items I have missed (or avoided) but I recently found one that analysed your tactics, how many goals you concede and score when playing that formation. You get how many games you have used for that formation and how many minutes that equates to. It is incredibly in-depth and you can lose hours to the pursuit of looking through stats and sheets before you even get to game one of the season.
The actual match plays well on my new (ish) PC. I have yet to try it on an older PC or Mac to see how the animations are coped with. I really like the directors cut of the match that gives you a variety of angles. The players are more realistic in their movement and their roles, it's still got a long way to go before the animations rival the likes of Fifa and Pro Evo, but then this game is not designed with that market in mind, it is a stats-freaks wet dream, it's not reliant on the graphics (although they are more polished throughout the entire game). The game has the normal options of speed, full match, extended, highlights and these are easily customisable to how long you want to spend in a match. I have it set to a reasonable speed and it can still take about 5-10 minutes of play time to get through a match. You have the feature of recording parts of the match allowing you to post them to your favourite social network sites. This is something I have no interest in, however if that is your bag......well it's in their now.
The game now also allows you to add and remove active leagues depending on where you want to actively manage. I did this going from the demo to the full game. I added the main European leagues to my already established UK structure. I started with the demo and enjoyed the changes so I invested in the game, so what happened next?
Well, I was at Aston Villa for about 4 months when Chelsea sacked their manager. I put out a press release stating my interest in the job, and immediately had to issue a public apology or face getting fired. Not that it mattered, I was offered the job at Chelsea, 4 months after starting in football (so 33 years old and just retired from playing) I am hired as the manager for one of the biggest names in football. Reality aside, check me out. (Talking about reality, if you did not see this story from about 6 years ago about a Football Manager fan applying to be the real manager of Middlesbrough, then you should have a look)
I have completed my first season and brought the team to 6th in the Premiership and in that time I have tried not to just splash cash on anyone, I have tried to scout young talent as well as experience. The trouble is with the name "Chelsea" comes the counter offer in the transfer market. A player worth £4.5 million is negotiated to £20million. Generally taking half my usable budget on one player! So far I have bought 2 players and signed about 4 or 5 who were nearing contract end dates or were young enough to tempt to Chelsea and only face a small fee for doing it. Will this work? I have no idea.
I have signed Michael Owen from Man Utd and Owen Hargreeves (both in their late 30's) for backup players, that's right 2 injury prone old players. How can this go wrong?
FM2012 is a great game. I am not a football fan, in fact I can't stand the real game. This is the irony of my gaming life. I love sports games.
I think for FM(any one in the series) I enjoy having 2 PC monitors, one playing a film or TV Series while I wade around the statistics of football. It is enjoyable to be able to take control of every aspect of the game and see the workings of one the worlds richest clubs (and then get fired as you drive the team into debt and the bottom half of the league table).
A few things I miss are the little holes they plugged a few versions ago. Like the fact you could add another human manager and loan a bad reserve to a low league team for £100million and neither board block the process! That was fun.
However they have got so much right in the franchise. More control over every aspect, from how you react to the media and the team talks, better animations in game and easier navigations between menus.
If you love the FM series, then you already own this game. If you are new to management sims and are looking for something to last you, well look no further. The learning curve may be a little steep if this is your first attempt, however you do have the step by step tutorial (which unlocks an achievement, that's the other thing that has been added!!) which guides you nicely through the basics and sure enough when you are hooked, you will keep learning as you play. I am still learning about every thing that you can do in the game, it is a VAST database of information and statistics that you can drop and pick up easily. It is great that it is now through Steam and has provided achievements for those who were starting to miss that Xbox Live feel.
In conclusion, I have to say it is the best FM yet and I am sure they will continue to improve on the forums feedback. This is the only football management game you ever need buy, I haven't tried EA's version, but I don't have time, I am too busy playing on Football Manager 2012.
If we did ratings this would get 4.5 stars. But we don't, so it doesn't.
