Game Reviews

Sports Interactive has done it again. The London based studio has been tinkering with Football Manager's interface for the second time in as many years. Last time this happened, in FM08, the sensation was something like going into your local supermarket only to find that the floor plan had been completely rearranged. This year, it's more like going to your usual place of work one morning to discover that the cubicle layout has been replaced by an open-plan office setup with empty spaces where racks of files used to be and a smiley faced young secretary in place of the withering old lady who looked like her next cigarette could be her last.

Football Manager's continual efforts to modernise have this time come at the expense of the game's navigational sidebar, which has been a staple of the series for decades, providing easy access to your team's squad interface, competition info, and manager options to name but a few. Navigating to these parts of the game is now catered for by tabs across the top of the interface, providing a setup that looks more like a Microsoft Office program than it does the FMs of old. Still, Sports Interactive has been gradually moving the interface in this direction for a few years now, so the transition is actually easier to get used to than you might initially think.

Joining these changes to the basic interface is an all-new setup for team tactics, which borrows from the Touchline Shouts feature of FM Live to produce a complete overhaul of the old tactics system. The new setup is confusing and frustrating at first - tactical sliders have been thrown out in favour of a team "philosophy" and "starting strategy", while the stalwart system of commanding player runs on the right mouse button is also a thing of the past. Replacing it is a system of micro-management for each player, which asks the manager whether their striker is a "complete forward" or "goal poacher", if their midfielder is of the "box to box" or "ball winning" archetypes, or whether a particular central defender should drop into cover while the other has the freedom to move forward.