Arsenal are sitting comfortably in second place and pushing for the title, having signed Carlos Tevez for a club record-breaking £43.5 million. On the international scene, Gary Hooper is England’s newest superstar having scored 10 goals in six games as England look the best they have in years. This can only be FOOTBALL MANAGER 2012 – find out why it’s awesome in our huge review!
Football Manager 2012 isn’t realistic in the sense that your game will play out exactly how football will play out in real life – that would be rather pointless. Tevez signing for Arsenal was never going to happen this summer, but maybe in an alternative universe it would have. Football Manager 2012 once again lets you take control in this alternate footballing world, and the results are as good as ever. The match engine has barely been touched, so matches themselves will play much like they did in 2011 – the main difference in this year’s release comes from the user-friendliness of it all.
Easy to navigate
In past games the menus haven’t always functioned in the most economical ways, and it would take a few clicks to find the information you were after. Sports Interactive has addressed this by making the important information easier to find via drop down tabs and related links on news posts, making managing your team from behind the scenes a lot more intuitive.
Important pages aren’t just easier to find, but they also look a lot cleaner as well. While lists of text suit the management sim genre, after playing Football Manager 2012 you realise it doesn’t have to be that way. The design team have got it spot on – creating pages that are as sleek as they are functional. All the important stats are right there for you to see, and if you want to dive deeper you’re no more than a click or two away.
This is something that Sports Interactive has nailed, offering an extremely in-depth game that is surprisingly easy to get to grips with. If you’re intimidated by the mass stat attack of previous Football Manager games, then Sports Interactive has taken you into account: they’re fully aware that not everybody wants to micromanage every small detail of their team, and there’s a huge range of options for selecting what parts you want to control. There’s also a new help system that covers a broad range of topics and allows you to easily search any query you may have.
One page that has been given a major overhaul is the Transfer Centre. It is now blissfully easy to see what bids have been made for players, and you can reject or accept all bids from one simple screen. Elsewhere in the transfer market, contract negotiations have been greatly improved upon. You can now lock specific sections of a contract (wages, length, clauses, etc.) so players know that’s as much leeway as you can afford to give. It’s a very simple addition, but one that changes negotiations for the better. Can’t afford to pay more than a certain wage? That’s fine, but expect players to demand better clauses as a result.
Footballers are people too
In the past, the human side of Football Manager has always felt lacking as the statistics often reduced players and managers to mere footballing robots, incapable of emotion or thought other than how to kick a ball. Now, before some smart-alec at the back chimes up about how footballers are just like that in real life, let’s be honest: they’re not and they all have differing personalities that require specific levels of care and attention. The series has tried to account for this and players have always come to you with their grievances, but it’s never gone beyond the stages of mindlessly clicking the same responses that you know will have a desired effect.
This year, Sports Interactive has tried to change all that by introducing tone of voice to the player interactions, meaning you can either calmly address your players or put your hairdryer on full blast and give them the Fergie treatment. This extends throughout the game, from team talks to simple conversations. Players no longer just jog along a set dialogue path, and you can now change their mood and recover from a conversation that was going bad.
All of this interaction is very welcome, and while it feels a lot more natural than in previous outings, it only manages to ward off staleness for a short period – especially as far as team talks are concerned. Descriptions of body language allow you to see players reacting to your talks immediately, and it soon becomes obvious exactly what you need to say to which players to get them fired-up or looking happy.
It’s also unfortunate that this interaction hasn’t been extended to press conferences or the boardroom. These are still lifeless clicking affairs, and having your assistant take all press conferences is required if you want to save yourself from trying to assault members of the assorted virtual press. Likewise, the boardroom hasn’t been given any major overhaul and so the real-life drama of manager/board relationships is very much missing.
Despite this lack of noticeable improvement in some areas, Sports Interactive has definitely tinkered for the better, as Football Manager 2012 is an all-round better game than last year’s instalment. None of the new additions and tweaks detract from the Football Manager experience and as a result – as seems to be the case most years – this is the best Football Manager yet.
Sports Interactive has delivered the same solid and addictive football management package that they’ve been doing for years. To an outside observer it may look like not much has changed, but to the Football Manager faithful the new bells and whistles will be greatly appreciated.
Football Manager 2012, from Sports Interactive and Sega, is due for release on October 21st for PC.
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