It can be very frustrating to see your player go round several defenders and be ideally placed to shoot only to hit the ball out to the wing or back towards their own goal. The players still don’t behave in a realistic fashion a lot of the time, although it’s definitely improved in this respect. The 3D match engine looks better than ever but whilst it looks great it’s far from being perfect. Those simply wanting to concentrate on what a real football manager would concern himself with will be pleased to learn there are some new tactical options to tinker with and the text commentary has been improved too. Those who like to develop their manager’s personal life will be interested to learn that you can buy shares and long-term investments. New items can be produced just in time for Christmas to rake in that extra cash.
New merchandising options are available allowing you to buy, sell and manage stock. Of course the other teams will be after you best youth players too, so this new feature is a double-edged sword. So what else is new this year then? There’s now a youth transfer market allowing you to offer contracts to players in other teams’ youth sides.
You’ll also find a series of widgets at the bottom of the screen and you can customise these to display information that you want to hand. In the developer’s defence I should mention that the ability to bind a menu to a hotkey (F1-F8) has been included, so you can access eight of your most visited menus at the touch of a button which does cut down a little on wading through menus. At first this is fine as it looks rather swish but before long you find yourself becoming rather impatient with the lack of immediacy. Sometimes the screens can take a few seconds to move from one to another.
I found myself looking in the manual to find out how to do certain things, such as removing an injured player from the squad, which is something I’ve never had to do with a football management game before. There’s far too much ploughing through various menus to get to things. Having an approachable game is certainly admirable but the interface isn’t as intuitive as it could have been. In short FIFA Manager 09 is trying to be more of a straightforward and approachable game that doesn’t require you to be a tactical genius. Will you be single or married? Will you play golf or take up sailing? Want to learn a second or third language? Want to control a player during the course of a match in a rather simplified fashion? These are options that are all open to.
You have some lifestyle options here too. There are many aspects of the game you can alter to make the game as easy or as challenging as you wish meaning virtually anyone should be able to find a difficulty level that suits them. Whilst you can just concentrate on managing your team, and there are many leagues to manage in, you can handle virtually every aspect of running a football club from developing the stadium to selling the advert boards. That is to say it’s not a football management simulation that only tasks you with a real football manager’s responsibilities. Fans of the series will be pleased to learn that FIFA Manager 09 manages to keep the standard of last year’s game but they might be disappointed to learn that not much has been done to improve it.įIFA Manager 09 remains very much in the same vein as the previous games in the series. The first two entrants in the FIFA Manager series weren’t up to much but last year’s FIFA Manager 08 showed real signs of improvement. That leaves SEGA’s and EA Sports’ efforts and first up is EA’s FIFA Manager 09.
This year there are only two as the latest Championship Manager game has been put back until April next year. It’s that time of year again when we usually have three new football management games vying for our attention.