A new Football Manager for iPhone, but has it learnt new skills since last season?
Format: PSP, iOS (version played) Dev: Sports Interactive Pub: Sega Out: 16/12/10 Players: 1
The unequivocal number cruncher that is the football management sim returns for a second foray on the iPhone and iPod Touch, and it’s fantastic the amount of changes they’ve made. None.
But, to be fair, it is constrained by a supremely limited choice of genre. The same large choice of countries and leagues are at your fingertips (11 countries and 34 leagues to be exact). So it would be fair to say that with this selection, you’d be well accommodated for, right? Well, in the selection of leagues for England, the one country the majority of you will contend in, the lowest league is the Blue Square premier, which is a real punch to the crotch for those of us who enjoy building a team up from the ground roots.
Meagre improvements can be seen here and there. You can now have three countries active in a game at once. Expect some slowdown when you do so though; but it’s a warmly welcomed addition, for both complexity and game elongation.
Another would be the tactic system. No meteoric improvements, but changes nonetheless. There’s still no dynamic movement of individual players to tailor make a play strategy for any given moment, but there are a more diverse set of standard formations, and you can assign individual players particular roles. You do feel a more identifiable sense of control, though not to the fullest extent wanted.
An addition of finances gives you control of a budget to run your team with moving forward, actively setting your wage packet and allocating funds accordingly. It’s a more sophisticated system then you got with FMH2010, but it is a somewhat boring aspect of the package.
Beyond these mere tweaks, no iPhone 4 retina display graphics and no real Game Center compatibility beyond leaderboards, I can’t help but feel a sense of disappointment towards FMH2011. Granted, it still has an insurmountable amount of depth that Championship Manager will never be able to touch, but the recipe hasn’t exactly moved forward since its last bake. It would be generic to say “a renovation, rather than an innovation,” but you can’t even call it renovated.
Jason England
Tags: download, football, football manager, iphone, mobile, sega, Sports, strategy
Evolution not revolution is how I generally try and take my games forward – that is I don’t rush loads of features into them, rather trying to ensure whats in there works and works well before adding something new in.
I realise this doesn’t leave lots of huge things for reviewers to shout about, but personally I think being the first iOS game to manage to run multiple leagues at the same time, allow users to find real world grounds and also the various improvements to the match experience (improved tactics, different grounds and weather, time of day etc. being visible in match) make it a compelling game to play ….
Then again I am of course, somewhat biased
PS – Another update will be available for the game in the near future (its in QA now) which will update the database with the January transfers (and allow you to select to use either this updated database or the original start of season one depending on your preference) … there will also be a few new features in the update … but I like surprises so won’t talk about them yet