Team talk features and shouting from the touchline
In the early days of Championship Manager I seem to remember waiting an age for loading screens, but despite the amount of data that the game has to digest there’s surprisingly short loading times ensuring that you can now get through a season quicker than ever before.
Before a match begins you can issue individual instructions to players on a whole host of skills such as man-marking, assigning corner takers and deciding on attacking and defensive mindsets. In a bid to create the same sort of interactivity with players and the feeling of involvement that we’ve been getting from the Football Manager series, Champ Manager has introduced a team talk feature allowing you to prep your team before the big game. During matches you can have as little or as much input as you wish. Personally I love to watch how the match plays out so I can make substitutions or amend formations, but once again there’s the option to speed up play, watch text commentary or watch the simple 3D animations dart around the pitch. The graphics are still fairly crude, but with the option of numerous different camera angles to choose from, it does give you a feeling of the ebb and flow of the match allowing you to make balanced judgements on any changes you wish to make. During the game you can now bark out orders to individual players, such as praising them for good play, criticising them when they get tackled for the umpteenth time or telling them to work harder if they haven’t had a touch of the ball for the last half hour. In all honesty, I didn’t see any noticeable different in the player’s behaviour on the pitch based on my touchline hollers, but I'm assured that it does have some impact on player morale and could effect the outcome of a match.
I’m holding off on judging how well the transfer market and scouting options work until the full review code arrives, but I’m assured that there’s been some upgrades which should make both processes intuitive and immersive. Let’s see,eh?
Click for larger imageOther new additions include the Conference North and South division and an all new multi-player battle mode where you can go head to head online with rival managers. Of course there are also achievements to be unlocked and the promise of future downloadable content
It is pleasing to see how the developers have stepped up their game in order to try and close in on the Football Manager series and it’s shaping up to be an addictive, albeit less involving game, than their rivals sim. It’s still excruciatingly addictive and I’ve already hid it away out of sight of ‘her indoors’, but when the review code arrives I’m sure I’ll be tempted to spend an hour or ten in an attempt to get Walsall FC into the Premiership.
We’ll have a full review on both the PS2 and Xbox 360 version shortly.
