Football Manager 26 review

How to improve Football Manager. This is a question that both Sports Interactive and gamers like me have been asking (almost) every year for the last 20 years. So the answers should, by law, be immediate and straightforward. It’s a show that consumes huge amounts of your time, and over the hundreds of hours you spend with it each year, you become as familiar with its weaknesses as you are with your spouse. And yet, the more time I spend with Football Manager 26, the most significant update to the ancient Collyer brothers’ formula in years, the more I wonder what the right answer to this question is.

Is this about making it a more technically impressive event? Sports Interactive clearly thinks so. The London studio reacted strongly to the cancellation of FM 25’s launch last year to change engines and deliver more technically significant update than usual. You have to admire a developer who does this.

Result? Simply put, the matches are more like real football. Now running in Unity, but most importantly, with greater fidelity and variety in player animations in the match engine, FM 26 shows details that weren’t there before. Okay, it doesn’t live up to the Matrix Awakens demo for breathtaking graphics, but it actually makes your job easier. Previously, I could look at the player profile screen to decide which of my Roma left-backs were in my starting XI, looking for numbers approaching 20. Now it becomes clear watching Angelino and Tsimikas on the ball: the former is quick and original, full of deft passes and passes. The latter is functional and less risky to own.

So the newfound fidelity of the match engine definitely serves the needs of the game. My manager’s eye can better observe how the team stays in shape out of possession, watch how striking substitutes hit their players with fresher legs, and notice when my center backs lose position. But there’s a player in me who just likes to see chilly goals being scored. Spectacular moments are clearly noticeable in this improved match engine, and that’s just as significant.

Adjust the fit

It’s entertaining how much more these extra details connected me with my players and how a clear and engaging story was told in some of the games. When I caught my star winger Matias Soule faking an injury, I felt disappointed in him. The way wonderkid Niccolo Pisilli repaid my faith in him by slotting the ball in from the edge of the box in absolutely world-class fashion in a Europa League match against someone as normal as Midtjylland. These things evoke emotions. This is a good thing.

Showing more of the match offers massive rewards in-game in FM 26. The thing is, I’m not sure the same philosophy extends to the rest of the game. Among the game’s more positive additions, such as 14 playable leagues from the game for women and a Premier League license for men, is a UI update that’s making my brain hurt.

The goal of this redesign is to show more information on each screen. The AI ​​probably thinks the benefits of this are two-fold: less clicking between menus and a quick overview of how deep the FM 26 simulation goes to create a real sense that there’s a living, breathing world of football beneath the numbers.

In practice, it’s like someone breaking into the house you’ve lived in for the last 15 years, rearranging everything, and leaving extremely detailed notes on all the cabinet doors where all your stuff is now. If this seems unpleasant, it’s only because the user interface was already overwhelming, and this game seems to double down on it while confusing me.

I spent So a lot of time sifting through extraneous information looking for the one stat I’m looking for, not because it’s not on a particular menu, but because there are 9,000 other things too. Working at Roma is not straightforward and the Italian press is not dismissive of your impoverished performance away to Como. My patience for playing “Guess Where the Menu I Could Now Navigate to” is running out.

Look, this isn’t a disaster. It’s functional enough and over time you learn its ways. There is even a bookmarking system that allows you to pin your most frequently used menus to the “portal” page. This is a redesigned hub menu that is intended to act as the home page for career records. Ironically, this tabs section shares portal space with such a ridiculous number of other items that they’re straightforward to miss, and the icons are so miniature that using them seems more tough than navigating to the intended old-style menus.

Big data

That’s why I wonder if a way to improve Football Manager would be to show the player less information, not more. There is a group of enthusiasts, quite a huge one, who can say that the entire series reached its peak with Championship Manager 01/02. No matching mechanism, much less detail, much fewer types of interactions. Just a huge player database, an inbox, and some fairly basic tactical options. This may sound like rampant Luddism, but after playing it on FM 26, I think there’s something to it.

The joy to be found in this series, a genre in itself, is that the more you play, the world builds around you. You begin to develop imaginary relationships with players, rival managers and the press. Stories begin to emerge about brave youth players who you gave a chance to in the first team, about the dream transfer you’ve been chasing for years but never had enough money to secure, about cup finals you lost on penalties and you swear you’ll win one day. But all this only happens when enough time has passed. And in contemporary FM, time simply passes too slowly.

In my first eight hours of saving at Roma, I played four league matches and one Europa League match. It’s partly my fault for spending so much time scouring the transfer market for teenage Brazilian left-wingers, but the lion’s share of the blame for playing at a glacial pace between games goes to the game. No matter how many tasks you delegate to your back-office staff, no matter how many types of news events you cancel, there always seems to be something inconsequential that stops the passage of time.

This is a philosophical problem, not a technical one. Sports Interactive would say it’s aimed at those who want a more classic FM experience in newer games on the “Touch” versions, but even they’re too taxed on the system to provide the fast-paced career of earlier Champ Man titles.

Perfect

And yet here I am, still playing the damn thing and still having so much fun. Make it complicated. Before, it was addictive because you had plans for the next season that you wanted to see before going to sleep. Now you just want to get to the next meeting. As frustrating as it is, refraining from listening to FM 26 really engages you.

If you’re ready to just go for it, FM 26’s simulation depth is as impressive as ever in the series. There are minor tweaks like searching for transfer offers via TransferRoom (basically a Craigslist for footballers) and a tactics overhaul that draws a clear dividing line between how you position your team in and out of possession, and both work well, giving you more granular control over two of the most significant and rewarding elements: buying and selling players, and making them do what you tell them on the pitch.

Currently, it may be too straightforward to employ a tactic where wingers wander into the box rather than crossing from distance, but given the enormity of this year’s changes, there doesn’t seem to be any glaring errors or cheese tactics. It’s well-balanced, and the ability to establish strikingly different player shapes and roles in and out of possession is a breath of fresh air in creating tactics.

But really, FM 26’s strengths are the same strengths that the series has always relied on. A huge and detailed database of players and staff and the way it simulates not only your crazy little club but the rest of the world. You check the Ligue 1 results knowing that you will never, ever take a job there. You are looking forward to the World Cup so you can watch the matches. This is an indicator of FM quality. Quite quickly you start to believe that the simulated world of football is real and it’s worth delving into the forensic details.

It is, if you will pardon the unforgivably tired cliché, a game of two halves. The improved version of match day is well worth the wait, showing you the details that will make you not only a elated fan, but also a better-informed manager. Off the field, however, it continues to overload you with information and doesn’t allow time to pass at any speed. The sum is as captivating as ever, but also often frustrating and exhausting.