Game Reviews

The Football Manager carnival is back in town, bringing with it hundreds of new rides and thousands of new employees. Sports Interactive has even gone to the trouble of making it look all different when you first enter. Those who've been here before will be in their element in no time, while first-timers will be eased into all the new attractions with handy guides and a bit of selective 'streamlining' to get them right to the heart of the fair.

Like with last year's Football Manager, large numbers of changes are being championed in the 2013 update, ranging from minutiae tweaks only the most hardened obsessive would notice to the addition of whole new modes of play for the first time ever in the series. Yes, I’m ignoring the handheld versions when I say that.

For the veteran, things are actually visibly different - and not just in the usual interface-shuffling way. For a start, that button which said 'New Game' or words to that effect? Gone, consigned to the dustbin of history. Starting a new game is so last year.

c (streamlined FM with lots of the more advanced features stripped out or simplified) or go online for some Versus, multiplayer-exclusive modes where you and multiple humans go tracksuit-to-tracksuit in custom cups and leagues. At the time of writing, though, you can't pick international teams for some reason.

New players would be advised to head straight for the Classic mode, which eases you into the FM experience without completely blitzing you with information. For example, press conferences have been removed, replaced with the occasional question posed in your inbox. Team talks are gone, as are pre-match opposition instructions - though these are technically available during matches using the Target Opposition option.

One of the only things remaining untouched in Classic mode is your tactics screen, allowing just as much tweaking, prodding and poking as you'd get in the Career mode. Alongside new players, Classic mode is also perfect for returning fans disillusioned with the increased complexity of recent efforts, or even those who've grown up a bit and find it difficult to spend so long grinding through a full-blown Career game.

These Classic rules are also a huge boon for multiplayer, speeding up the process of getting from game to game. But losing games can prove even more frustrating than usual. Here's the rub: morale plays a big part in your success or failure. Win a few games and you can immediately see the difference in the way your players spray it about the park. Lose a few and suddenly your champs look like chumps.

In a Career game, you'd be able to arrest this slump with motivational team talks, chats with individual players, team meetings and so on. In Classic, however, you can't. It can feel like a Catch 22 situation: the only way to get the team back on track is to win games, but you can't get the morale to where it needs to be without winning games. In one Feyenoord game I played, a bad start to a season ended up in ten matches with only two draws gained, four European defeats in a row and a 6-1 clubbing at Steve McLaren's FC Twente. Painful.