Free Video Game Review: Soccer Manager 2016

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

Well, I really got fucked in the ass when I missed this week originally. Previous week was a wasteland of free games (that I had a reasonable chance of playing: I don’t speak Russian!), then this week gives me a football game and ONLY a football game. Which would be fine if it weren’t for two things:

1. I am not a football fan. At all. Seriously, there are very few things I’d want to do less than watch or play football by choice.
2. I used my “get out of playing a game I really don't want to play free” card last time, so doing it this time feels like a cop out.

So yeah, this week’s catch up review is VERY much a case of me playing a game I had no chance of liking. Still, I will admit that, if I did have to choose to play a football game, I’d much prefer to be the manager because I could at least view it as a strategy game of sorts. After all, when you think about it, how a football game works could be argued as being a bit like an RTS: you have to select the appropriate player to make it easier for you to push the ball into the opponent’s side of the field or stop the opponent from doing that and tactically move the ball towards the player best suited for moving the ball further in should you encounter an obstacle.

...Actually, when put like that, football doesn’t sound that bad. Doesn’t excuse the fact I find it boring as all hell to actually watch, but hey, a revelation is a revelation! Now if only they would combine football with death traps...actually, wait, that’s basically Blood Bowl in a nutshell. Dang it!

Incidentally, someone get Games Workshop to remake Blood Bowl. They did brilliantly with Space Hulk and I would kill for an opportunity to play it!

Anyway, back to Soccer Manager 2016. Long story short, it’s not a BAD game, but I think it’s fair to say that this is not a game to get introduced to football games to, as I ended up stuck on the first match because the game kept refusing to let me move on after I’d put the new player on (my player had been red carded) because it wouldn’t tell me how to change my tactics and nothing I clicked on told me what I had to do to make the change. This is probably a game that could do with some sort of tutorial to allow those unfamiliar with this type of game a chance to get the hang of things properly, as that seemed like a really stupid thing to get stuck on for over ten minutes (and only ended because I went “Fuck this, I’ve got better things to do with my time than stare at this screen and be unable to move forward because someone didn’t think to explain how to move through this screen properly!” and closed the game down...yes, I'm impatient, but can you blame me for getting frustrated when I hadn't been told at all how to move forward and was stuck on what should have been an easy screen to navigate as a result?).

I also don’t like the fact that the game feels more like a browser game than an officially released Steam game, as it even has the buttons one would expect to find if they were playing the game on a browser. I will admit that this is a bit of a nitpick, since there are some good browser games out there, but having the game open with a suggestion to play the game through Facebook when you opened it through Steam is not a great sign. I opened it through Steam, why would I want to also open it through Facebook?

Still, quality wise, there’s not a lot of criticisms I have with it. Sure, it’s a simple game in terms of design and aesthetics (if not especially newcomer friendly), but I could see this being a decent time killer if you can’t afford Football Manager 2016 and need your fix of football team managing. The fact the game has in game purchases is something I personally have to frown upon, but it’s not to the ridiculous extent that Frozen Free Fall: Snowball Fight was, so that’s something at least. I suspect I probably COULD have gotten into this game had it been more newcomer friendly, but, as someone who has only played one football game in his life (and that was on the Sega Genesis), it’s fair to say that I probably couldn’t have been further from the target audience of this game if I tried. Which I guess is a good sign on one level: if I’m saying that I might have found this game to my liking had it been laid out to suit a newcomer to this type of game when I usually find football so boring that I don’t even bother to keep track of the names of football stars (I can name a few, like David Beckham and Gary Lineker, but mostly because I’ve heard of them for non-football reasons than because I actually hold any real opinion on them), that’s kind of like saying that you don’t think Fire Emblem: Awakening is that bad when you usually hate JRPGs and turn-based strategy games.

So yeah, if you’re not a football fan, this game probably won’t change your mind at all. If you like strategy games and football, you might want to get a more intuitive game than this one if you’re not already used to playing these types of games, but it should be a decent time sink. That’s really the long and short of it.