Reviews

Football/Soccer management games don't usually get reviewed but I played a lot of these during my lifetime and having played this a lot lately I decided to give it a review here.

When I initially played this I fell in love with it. Perhaps it was the music that played at the start with the option to play it during the game. Perhaps it was the way you selected your team on a desktop computer. Perhaps it was the way you can use your phone to buy/sell players and recieve info on your opponents. Or perhaps it was watching the match itself where it actually showed some action rather than just text. There were a number of positives with this game, there are however some negatives.

The main problem is the player pool remains the same, when players retire at 31 the only thing that changes is they become 18 again, don't you wish it was like that in real life? The fact is their form rating usually doesn't change and for most players they only diminish, which means by the third season it will be impossible to buy a defender with a rating higher than 5 (out of 9). So it has significant limitations.

So in essence 1st Division Manager is good for one season, after three seasons it becomes a mess, especially after buying the brilliant or world class England players and then selling them off when they become average or worse, soon every player will have a rating of 5 or less. Think if you have injuries.

There is a crafty way to earn more money, look up any player in the datafiles and locate some free agents, then buy them for nothing and then sell them off again, that way you can buy Lineker, Barnes, Shilton, Rush and Robson all in your squad easily.

This could have been a lot more, it's got some great features to make it so but its potential is spoiled by some clumsyness in the code.

Time for me to dig out another football management game to review, and I decided to look at 1st Divsion Manager, which was released by Code Masters of all people.

This, like other football management games, has you manage a club and help guide them from the lowest division all the way up to the top division, which I will explain later. The game begins with very nice title music which is done by Lyndon Sharp who done music for a number of Code Masters games including a couple of Dizzy's games. In this title screen comes a very unique option, the game's name is taken from the old English 1st Division which was the top tier league in English football before the Premier League formed, so here Division 1 is the top division, that is unless you choose to play with Superleague turned on, this means Division 1 becomes the second tier and replaced by the Superleague which in turn replaced Division 4, which is just how it ended up in real life. Was this programmer predicting something? It also means that the game is called 1st Division Manager, yet it may not be the top tier league and thus it could end up being Superleague Manager. You also play in FA Cup matches during the season as well.

After this we enter our name and your team to manage, which unlike most football management games where you had to choose a team to manage, this game has you enter a team to manage, so you can add your Sunday League team, you can be Barcelona. Then you have to enter a security access code for the Codemasters Management Database computer consisting of four characters, even 1234 will do fine, it's not like anyone's going to hack into my game or anything. Or will they?

So now to the game itself and instead of a menu we have a nice looking desk with our options on. There's the computer I just mentioned where we enter our code we just created. Here you can arrange your squad by making adjustments to the starting line up and your formation as well as change player names, so we'll replace Dawes, Hyde and Tucker with Messi, Suarez and Neymar then. You can arrange training for your players, choosing from handling, tackling, passing and shooting. There's team status which views your rating and morale as well as the next opponents, financial status which shows your balance and wages and also gives you the option to raise or lower your entry share, the diary which also shows the next opponents and options which allows you to change the colour of the computer screen from green to black and turn off security so that you'll never need to enter your code again, given I doubt seriously anyone will hack into it, unless I've given someone here a hint to try at least.

Back to the desk now, we have a phone which allows you to call the transfer market to buy and sell players, you buy players by entering the surname of the player you wish to buy from the game's database which I'll explain later, so you can type Ronaldo all you want but there will be no records. You can call the bank manager to keep track of your balance, ask for a loan or repay the loan. You can also call the physio who informs you of any injuries, the coach who lets you know which players need improvement on what skill and the scout who'll give you a report on your next opponents, but for a price, and you still pay him wages on top of that. There's the file drawer which shows you your league fixtures, your bank statement, the league tables and the player database which will come in handy for buying players. The newspaper shows you all the results from the previous week, then there's the radio which turns back on the lovely title music to play during the game.

When you're satisfied with your team selection it's time to go through the door and begin our match. In here we have commentary on the bottom of the screen and we also have action on the pitch with the players moving with the ball, just like a football match, very impressive. The commentary is descriptive enough for you to understand, it would read something like, Lycett tackles Sheedy, Sheedy sidesteps, Sheedy passes to Proctor, Proctor keeps the ball, Proctor shoots at goal....goalie dives....IT'S A GOAL, and with this Barcelona are a goal down already, that last bit not being part of the commentary but rather me displaying my disgust. The action is nice too and gives you a good sense of watching a match. The players are small with one team playing in blue and the other playing in red. The commentary can be sped up if you so wish to do so.

So the game is over and we drew 1-1 thanks to Neymar's late equaliser. But moving on we lost in the FA Cup to Doncaster and Messi got injured and now he's out for seven weeks with a dislocated shoulder, and to rub salt in the wounds, when I returned to my desk I get a letter which reads You have been knocked out of the FA Cup competition, thanks for rubbing it in.

At first this seems like an ideal football management game with just about all the features you want, but the main problem is the longer you play 1st Division Manager the less playable it becomes. Player form depletes and never improve so with, that by the time you make it to the top division, you won't have a good enough squad, nor will any of the other teams for that matter. Signing players can also be a chore as you have to pretty much go through all the players in the database individually to find the player you want. Injuries also seem to pile up more than you'd like to.

But 1st Division Manager is still a good attempt of an arcade-style football management game and a refreshing change to many minutes of waiting for menus to load and just relying on your score to update by itself. It's just too ineffective to bring lasting enjoyment. Not a bad effort though.

Even Code Masters got into the ever-increasing football manager market! Already it feels different with some nice music on the title screen, which you can also choose to play during the game as well. In this game you have to enter your team name, so you can enter Man Utd, or Wolves or Westfield and you're set to go. You can also enter a security access code for some reason but you can turn this off to save the hassle of remembering it all the time, like is your data really going to get hacked? So rather than a menu you have an office! There's the phone to call your mum, I mean the bank manager, physio, scout, coach and the transfer market, which is a real piece of work, because if you want to sign anyone, you have to type their name in, you have to find the players yourself and then type them in to the market. There's a computer where you can select your squad and turn off the security like I mentioned earlier, the files view the tables, fixtures and the players which comes in useful for the aforementioned transfer market, and the newspaper which shows the results, and of course the radio to turn on or off the music. As other people have commented previously, the best way to build your squad is to sign unemployed players for nothing and then sell the, immediately to make some dough to sign the best players, which kind of spoils the fun of it a bit but you win at all costs I guess. The match screen is also nice upgrade, here we have an actual match playing with playing running around the pitch with the ball passing it around and shooting towards the goal as the match commentary details what's happening. You can speed up the game with the cursor keys if you wish as well. As the same users before also state, the game seemingly breaks if played for more than two seasons as everyone eventually becomes crap in the end and signing players is ultimately pointless. It's a shame because this is a massive step up from most football manager games and sold for less money. It's got a nice look and feel, it keeps you intrigued, the music is a welcome addition even if 1 it gets old and 2 it doesn't really fit the game, but it's still a nice addition nevertheless. I did like this one a lot which reflects on my score, I am aware of the faults it appears to suffer from as you play on but I can only review up to how far I played, and from I played of this it was a really positive experience, either that or I've played enough bad ones to appreciate this one more than most people would.