For a game whose price was just as high as fans wanted to pay, Championship Manager is a heck of a simulation! The database gets a September update (which is a highly recommend update since it also fixes some in-game bugs) that adds the summer transfers into play, so you start the 2009/2010 season just like the real teams.
The player data, from what I managed to see by myself, is quite good and not only the top players are well researched, but the lower profile ones as well. For example, since I believe that a good football management game is one that manages to be amazing even in the lower leagues, I have started my first game in Belgium with Charleroi – a team and a championship I know very little about, and that was the entire point. The result after one season? Better than anticipated, I managed to get a good run, sign some important players and establish myself in Belgium, ready for a bigger challenge. So CM2010 succeeded!
Unfortunately, the match engine is still not perfect: fullbacks have a tendency to blast the ball out of bounds even when they are alone with the ball, goalkeepers tend to be supermen when it comes to penalties and some other decisions made by the players are at least strange, but it’s something you can get used with.
The set piece creator is another hit in CM2010 because it really allows you to create your own set pieces – as simple or complicated as you wish them to be. It’s a real joy to win a tough game after a corner you spent half an hour tweaking, so I guess that can be called “job well done”. You can also practice these set pieces, as well as other elements (like penalty taking, shooting and even full games), but I am at the moment unsure how much do these practice sessions matter in the real game. It would be great if the quality of a set piece could be decided by the amount of practice it received, but I really doubt that’s the case in Football Manager 2010. But at least it’s a good start!
The visuals of the game are pretty standard. The 3D match engine, as I said before, delivers some pretty cool players – at least some better looking ones compared to FM2009, but the background image is a bit too shiny and tiring, but fortunately you can at least block the animations. Navigation through the menus is easily done, even though I find it hard to get used with the fact that pressing Backspace on your keyboard won’t work in the game to take you back.
After years of struggling from the Championship Manager series and Football Manager dominance, Championship Manager 2010 comes to change the game a little bit and it is a viable alternative to FM. I am sure that most of the football management genre fans will enjoy playing Beautiful Game Studios’ title which is a big leap forward compared to 2008 and a high quality product for 2009. Sports Interactive should be worried!
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