Football Manager 2008 on Xbox 360 provided a flat 2D representation of the on-field action, which was really handy for getting an idea of how often your left back was being skinned by the opposition’s right winger, but offered little in the way of judging how often your striker was winning headers at the back post.įootball Manager 2021 Xbox Edition, on the other hand, now features a resplendent TV-style 3D view of the pitch, providing full realisation of how your team is carrying out your instructions. If you did indeed play any of the previous console versions of Football Manager, then the biggest change is going to be the match engine. Training offers similar but entirely optional granularity, giving you the option to hand this over wholesale to your coaching staff. It offers a wealth of tactical options, not just in terms of formations, but at a more granular and individual player level, allowing you to decide if your central defenders are no-nonsense stoppers or ball-playing liberos, for example. Nevertheless, at its core, this is everything you would expect and want a Football Manager game to be. This is somehow worse though, as there seems to be some weird acceleration applied to the cursor that sees it ramp up from too slow to too quick, making it a frustrating means of navigation. In fact, there is an option to mimic the PC experience more closely by pressing in the left stick to switch to an on-screen cursor. It is pretty much the only way Sports Interactive could have done it to make it even remotely usable, and first-time players will find it perfectly sensible and acceptable, but it makes the whole thing substantially clunkier than it is with a keyboard and mouse. The left analogue stick is used to flick you between those different windows, with the d-pad then used to navigate within that window and the face buttons serving as contextual selection buttons. In an attempt to make the interface easier to navigate using a controller, each distinct section on the screen is treated essentially as its own window. Each facet of the game – from matchday preparations to contract negotiations to scouting and everything else in between – comes complete with a short but sufficiently detailed tutorial that I would absolutely recommend you’d sit through. Thankfully, Sports Interactive haven’t taken the From Software route of leaving you to figure all of this out by yourself. There is a quite frankly dizzying amount of information to take in and pore over, even for a slimline version of the full fat version you’ll find on PC. If you’re a console-only gamer and, therefore, this is your first time playing a Football Manager game in at least 13 years – or, indeed, this is your first time playing a football management game at all – then Football Manager 2021 is still likely to seem exceptionally daunting. However, don’t think this means that it’s going to be a cake walk. By doing so, it’s an easier game to get into and, therefore, generally much better suited to a console. A port of their streamlined spinoff FM Touch series, Football Manager 2021 Xbox Edition aims to deliver a faster and more accessible experience than that provided by its full-fat brethren on PC by focussing primarily on the three Ts – tactics, transfers and training.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |