FIFA Manager 12 review (PC)

There’s a strange thing about football management games. For a genre that is so frequently accused (perfectly accurately) of being about spread-sheet versus spread-sheet, story is absolutely central to the entire genre’s appeal.

Now, unlike the BioWare or Final Fantasy epics, there is no grand narrative prepared for you, with perfectly timed twists and turns. No celebrated writer or creative director has crafted characters for you to love and hate, to aid and betray. There isn’t a grand vision of a happy ending already laid out when you take your first step on your quest.

No; football management games are all about providing you with the platform to create your own stories. All those stats and numbers and formations that represent players and game plans help create the plot twists and turns that might embarrass a Hollywood director. When your team of underdogs manages to triumph in the final with goals from of your most unlikely player, you’ll shout out loud with joy.

That side, the story that happens around the game, is what EA Sports FIFA Manager 12 really focuses on.

They’ve done this by trying to simulate everything. From the nuts and bolts of tactical plans and finding the right players to take you to glory (or avoid disaster), to an almost overwhelming degree of detail on the financial side – where you can hire and fire ad agencies, negotiate with potential sponsors, change ticket prices game by game, stand by stand, and design exactly how those stands will look. You’ll also be having personal conversations with each of your players, and living an entire life outside of the game – buying houses, investing in stocks, finding love and practicing your golf game.

Thankfully, if any of these disciplines aren’t to your liking, you can disable them or delegate the hard work to an appropriate assistant – which seems like another way that EA are focused on allowing you to play out the story you want, where you either guide your club of choice to glory, or play a career game where you start as a newbie coach and work your way up to the top, job by job.

FIFA Manager 12

Sadly, where the game falls flat is in those nuts and bolts. The tactical stuff is pretty comprehensive – though the interface is a little unwieldy, requiring multiple loading screens to adjust anything. The core problem is that you’re never entirely certain how your tactical changes are affecting things.

You see, there are four ways you can play a match. At the most removed level, there’s simulation, which just shows you your players’ fitness, a number representing how well they’re playing and when goals have been scored. You can make changes, but it’s very, very removed from the action of a football game and the result of the match..

Then there’s a view that is like watching a text commentary of a game on the internet – all short sentences describing the action every few minutes. There’s a video text version, but not only does it not provide any information at all, we’ve never had teletext in South Africa, so it doesn’t even induce nostalgia. Finally, there’s the FIFA Manager series’ great differentiator – the 3D match engine.

FIFA Manager 12

It’s very pretty – especially compared to FIFA Manager’s competitors. You can identify famous players by face, tell them apart on the field fairly easily, and their passing, tackling and all the rest are of the main FIFA game’s quality (if but a few years-old version of it).

It uses the same four minutes to a half formula that FIFA does – which is where another flaw lies. In FIFA 12, defences are inherently weak and stupid, and attacks very direct, because you need to fit the goalmouth action of 45 minutes into 4. You need to do the same in FIFA Manager, just so you can simulate real life results. Unfortunately, this makes setting up tactics for FIFA Manager very frustrating, as your players – even the best players in the world – are designed to be beaten…easily.

This problem extends to the other ways of viewing the game, where, while you can give orders, you’re never quite certain how much of the result is down to your tactics, and what effect those tactics are actually having. That said, the game is probably best experienced in the text mode, as this gives you decent feedback, with good control. Still, it’s a massive flaw in what is the core of the game. Like a shooter where the worst part of the game is actually firing the guns.

Still, FIFA Manager 12 does a lot of things right – giving you near absolute control of your football club of choice and allowing you to live the dream. It’s pretty, it sounds good and it tries to bring something unique to the genre. It’s just a pity that the actual core game itself is so flawed.