Football Manager 2018
It’s a game of two halves
DEVELOPER SPORTS INTERACTIVE • P UBLISHER SEGA • P RICE US$ 60 • A VAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL sigames.com
When you buy this year’s edition of Sports Interactive’s venerable management sim you actually get two games. The first is Football Manager 2018, a formidable database heaving with nested spreadsheets, endless tabs of exhaustive statistics, and a dizzying number of ways to exert your influence over proceedings. The second is Football Manager 2018 Touch, a misleadingly titled stripped-down version of the first game and the only one of the two, I think, that is worth your time.
In its non-Touch form, FM18 is gargantuan, a bloated, obese beast that doesn’t so much suffer from feature creep as feature gorge. It has sat there, over the past few years, stuffing its ravenous maw with every new football-related trend, eager to regurgitate marketing buzzwords onto a press release to announce this season’s new tactic. There are manager mind games to engage in with rivals, pre-match questions to fend off in the tunnel, social media feeds relaying via hashtags what the fans really think, and this time round a squad dynamics system that tasks you with accommodating player morale among the various social groups your squad splits itself into. It is all so desperately, crushingly, pointlessly tedious.
The issues are twofold. One, there is almost never a sense any of it actually makes a difference. You told the press before a local derby that you were “passionately” “expecting a big performance” from your star striker. He then fails to register a shot on target. Were these related? Was there any cause and effect at work? Who knows. So next time you get asked a question about your star striker, you just guess at an answer and hope for the best.
The other issue is that it slows everything to a crawl. This is a game that is relentlessly nagging you. In between matches you’ll be clicking through countless notifications, most of which don’t actually ask you to do anything. And it takes forever. I was playing with a small player database to ensure the fastest possible performance and I spent far more time sitting and watching a loading bar than I ever did playing a game.
In its Touch form, FM18 is lean and trim, the result of careful pruning of its most egregious excesses. It realises that the fantasy of the football management sim is thinking you can lead your favourite team to glory better than its current real life manager. As such, Touch prioritises the basics: picking a team, choosing a playing style, buying and selling players, and that’s pretty much it. There’s depth there, if you want it; you can still go in and tweak training regimes or instruct your winger to cross from the byline more often. But it doesn’t weigh you down with all the minutiae. And it’s fast, too.
Sports Interactive is advertising FM18 Touch as a “free bonus” with FM18. I’d say it’s worth the price of admission alone.
a bloated, obese beast that doesn’t so much suffer from feature creep as feature gorge