Review: Football Manager 2007

Publisher: SEGA    Developer: In-House    Platforms: PC
Posted on October 15th, 2006 at 8:54pm by Timmy

Football Manager 2007 has descended upon us, Sports Interactive introduce us to the latest instalment of their Football Manager series. Yet again they have promised us an abundance of features; over 100 new ones to be precise, improved graphics, improved match engine and so forth, but will this be a disappointment like Football Manager 2006 was? Will the latest instalment just be a data update? I was given a copy to find out exactly how good it was.

First thing I noticed was that it took no time to create a game whatsoever. Granted I have a pretty good system (see system rig at end) but it amazed me how fast it was. There is no more “huge” database setting as there was in FM2006 (football manager 2006), there’s just small, medium and large. So I clicked large and decided to do the English, German, and Spanish leagues. All with at least two leagues and I would start of in Germany as Werder Bremen. It took literally under one minute for it to be done! FM07 is now a lot more user-friendly with its wizards for starting games and adding managers, and constant helpful tips while processing. Although for people who have been playing for a while you do find out the odd thing which you didn’t before. You can know decide whether you were a Sunday-league footballer, a national footballer etc. as part of your manager profile and this influences the jobs that are offered to you later on. I made myself a national-footballer and had a nationality of England and U.S.A. offered me the job couple days after I applied for it. May seem bits unrealistic but nowadays unproven managers are given important jobs, take Klinsmann and Germany. It’s a nice new feature which adds more realism and interest into the game.

The skin has yet again changed with shortcuts running along the bottom, it takes some time to get used to but it’s a nice addition which speeds up moving between menus. One thing that I noticed was that you don’t have the dropdown menu anymore when you are looking at a league. In other words if you’re looking at the English Premiership there’s no quick way to get to the English Championship, which can be annoying at times.

The scouting area too has been refined, with your scouts being able to give you “report cards” on players. Ultimately this report card tells you the pros and cons about that player, whether he can live up to your club’s stature and that scout’s personal opinion of whether you should buy him or not. It also seems that lower-league clubs have restrictions on where you can send your scouts due to financial reasons. It’s always small new features like this that make the latest instalment all the more worthwhile to get!

Now lets move on to one of the more anticipated new features of FM2007, the feeder clubs. What you do is you go to your boardroom and request for a new feeder club, or parent club if you’re a lower-league club, and most of the time the board will go and come back with you in two weeks with three clubs. They will ask for your preference and most of the time they take the club that you want. The benefits however of all this seem minimal, at least to the big-name clubs. The only benefit is that you can have a club to loan out the players you don’t want clogging up your first team to one of your feeder clubs. It’s a nice new addition that hopefully will become more in-depth as the game evolves. There might be a larger benefit for the smaller clubs but I wasn’t able to find that out.

Another major change is the retirement of the “regen” system, instead there new system called “fred” takes it place. “Fred” is a system whereby a lot more players graduate from your youth facilities, most of them poor, like in real-life but the odd one becoming a world superstar. This all depends on your youth facilities though, so if you’re a conference club, chances are you won’t have any good players cropping from your youth program. This in turn makes the game a lot more realistic. What does fred actually stand for…? I’m not really sure but that’s not really important.

You can also now sign pre-contracts, but I haven’t gotten the hang of these at the moment, I think these are there for players under the age of 17 so they will join your club when they turn professional instead of some other big-name club snatching them from under your radar. In the first year though there is little use of this, seems more to be something for the long-term games to be used in conjunction with “fred.”

Last but not least, more player interaction now with pre-match and half-time talks having an influence on the players performance for that half, there is a larger possibility for you to say something wrong and to get one of those players all fired up and angry at you. It gets a bit time-consuming towards the end and it’s a good thing that you can leave it up to your assistant manager to deal with because at times you get sick of having to think of what to say to your players, but then again this is a managing game after all.

There have also been smaller features and improvements in the game, such as being served a touchline ban for questioning the referee’s decision too often, these touchline bans are a real killer as you can’t talk to your team at any point, nor can you change team tactics. Your assistant manager does however, take care of substitutions. Also, quite a big change is the fact that the AI has been tweaked and this game is definitely harder than before. This is a big strong-point for me because it means that you will have to focus on all aspects of the game unlike in the past where you could ignore training and player morale and still get the results. This is no longer the case. Also, the newly-designed FM Editor has a bunch of new features and is now lightning fast compared to the old one, so you have now more liberty to play around with the database, you don’t even have to backup your old database now as you can choose the database you wish to use when you start a new game.

SIGames and Sega have brought us a better, more up-to-date and faster game than last year. Is it worth your 25 pounds? I’d say it is. Sadly I didn’t get to test out the network function, seeing as this is one area that they seem to ignore every year, but I hope they’ve resolved the speed in that part too. Naturally I encountered some bugs but SIGames are one of the few companies out there that continue to support their games until they deem it to be near-bug-free. The newly-designed FM Editor has a bunch of new features and is now lightning fast compared to the old one, so you have now more liberty to play around with the database, you don’t even have to backup your old database now as you can choose the database you wish to use when you start a new game. You can find a bunch of screenshots which show all of the above features in more detail to the right.

Pros:

-Enhanced AI.
-Lot’s of new features, including further user-friendliness.
-Overhaul of Youth system.
-Speed issues seem to be finally resolved. 

Cons: 

-Some bugs have crawled themselves through the beta stage yet again, expect a patch on release day though.

Test Rig:

-Asus P5W DH Deluxe
-Conroe E6600
-2GB DDR2-800 Ram
-ATI Radeon x1900xt

Reviewer: Timmy

9/10