Football Manager is still the best sim of its kind, but FM23's serious lack of major improvements shows an annual release schedule taking its toll. Our review:
Out 8th November on PC, beta now for pre-orders. Console edition for PS5, Xbox and Touch, Mobile and Arcade versions for Switch, Android and iOS coming soon.
Of course, the reason titles like this so often get a bye is because the experience is still fundamentally sound. Who am I kidding - it's still Football Manager, which means it's still capable of enthralling you in absolute terms, fostering an obsession with numbers above 15 that verges on sexual. It's still built around a player and staff database so unfathomably detailed that real scouts and data analysts use it as a recruitment tool.
Football Manager certainly isn't broken, then. But this isn't like a COD campaign you spend seven hours with every year. Each release asks for a lot of your time, and over that vast amount of hours every minor rankle becomes amplified. Playing FM is a lot like a marriage, in that way. If I was a data analyst, I'd be able to tell you exactly why it was so effective, and why despite the AI's newfound reactive decision-making it was unable to counter it. But I'm not. The heatmaps give me the fear. I can just about get my head around the passes and shots attempted diagrams, but truthfully all I take from them is whether to tick the 'work ball into box' button.
This feels like as good a moment as any, 30 years after Champ Man's debut, to stop and really take stock of FM's current form. A vastly engrossing management game with depth and detail threatening to spill over out of the screen at you, made by a studio whose talents and understanding of the sport's intricacies are absolutely unrivalled. A £40 proposition you can easily lose a hundred enjoyable hours to. All true.
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