NIDZUMI+

Now we’ve mentioned this on the site before but why didn’t Sports Interactive take this year as a gap year due to the impending release of the MMO, Football Manager Live? It would be the perfect excuse to sit back and make a few changes to the core game and people would understand why it wasn’t as good as it could have been. Despite that 2009 sees some of the biggest upgrades the series has experienced in years.

Football Manager 2009 follows on from previous years renditions but adds a ton of minuscule tweaks that just makes the game run a whole lot smoother. Stuff like transfers are slightly more in-depth, player interaction is a whole lot better as well but on a whole the game just plays better. It would really be a massive task to list every little tweak and improvement that in the grand scheme of things don’t change much but experienced fans of the series will notice and enjoy.

Well that’s enough sidestepping before mentioning the 3D match engine. Football Manager has often been seen under disparagement from gamers outside of the franchise. The truth is that at first reading text or looking at dots run around a pitch isn’t appealing to people who aren’t hardcore into the game. Now you get a bigger sense of what’s going on with the 3D match engine. Great goals actually look great, tackles and offside offences are now easier to comment on and the whole match day experience is just bought up another level.

The only criticisms you could have of the engine is that the stadiums are just a solid colour and the graphics aren’t brilliant but you have to remember that the barrier for entry has to be low. It’s easy to understand why the game doesn’t look like FIFA but this is definitely a step towards that. Maybe more camera angles for replays, better animations for player collisions and more of a tv presentation would be a great step forward for next years title. Otherwise see this as a 3D representation of the old match engine.

They’ve also added press conferences which features you answering a bunch of questions about your players, the match and transfer rumours before or after a match. They work well at first and can have a good effect on your teams morale. The only problem is that once you’ve played through a season you’ll hardly ever get any new questions and nearly every week you’ll get asked what type of football your going to play even if you always give the same answer. Also the press conferences feature a rather entertaining ’storm out’ button that would make sense if there were any offensive questions in the game. It doesn’t make sense when you storm out of a conference over a perfectly legitimate question.

Finally the other major improvement is the assistant manager feedback throughout a game. He’ll tell you how your tactics aren’t working and what you could do to improve them. Last year you got the option to tell your players what to do to other players. For example you could mark them more, go harder into tackles or show them onto their weaker foot. Your assistant manager tells you what to-do-what-to-who but there isn’t just an ask assistant button on the menu for this. So you have to jump between the feedback menu and the opposition tactics menu over and over again before every match. If he’s going to tell you what to do at least let me have an ‘I agree and implement these tactics’ button.

Unfortunately I have been sucked into the world of Football Manager yet again and although it has a few flaws here and there they aren’t impeding ones. Deploying the recommended tactics isn’t a massive chore, press events can be covered by your assistant and the 3D match engine is such an improvement on what a Football Manager game has ever had before you don’t even notice the minor flaws.

Last years rendition was such a flawless one that you had to think hard on how they could improve it. Surprisingly they have in nearly every way you could think of and it becomes a must buy for fans of the series. Although if your on the fence on whether you should pick this up, this year is a great year to do it. The 3D engine makes the game more accessible from a game stand point although from a tech stand point you’ll need a fairly decent system to play the game at reasonable speed.