Football Manager 2015 Review
When you first glance at a Football Manager game, the fact that this game gets released on a yearly basis may come as a shock. At the end of the day, it’s basically a big excel sheet with football matches you can’t play. Hell, if I posted a screenshot from Football Manager 2011 next to a screenshot of Football Manager 2015, you will notice some differences in the menu layout, but I doubt you can tell me which one is which unless you’ve played them. Football Manager was never about its looks, rather each iteration becomes deeper and grander in scope, with scouting, training and even handling the media becoming more similar to the real life profession of a football manager. As a result, some years mark some very significant improvements over the previous year’s iteration whilst, other years, it’s merely a minor upgrade. Football Manager 2015, at least for now, seems to be an off-season for the highly successful managing sim.
The biggest addition that Football Manager 2015 brings to the table is the ability to define your managerial style. Are you more of a tracksuit manager who likes to follow closely his players in training and help them develop that way? Or are you more of a tactical manager who likes to leave the training to coaches whilst you read up on your scout reports for a player to fit your dream tactics? You can allocate points to different areas at the start of the game to help define what kind of manager you want to be in the game world. Unfortunately, this merely seems to change how people and the media react to you rather than shape your game experience; you can put all your points towards tracksuit manager and spend your entire career never looking at your players’ training and nothing will change. Considering this was meant to be one of the highlights of this year’s release, I don’t think this adds any depth to the gameplay and it’s definitely not a reason to upgrade.
Another big change which the franchise went under was a redesign of the UI. Instead of having all your options available at the top of the screen, they are visible on a sidebar on the left hand side of the UI. It may sound like a minor change, but when you spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours looking at the same menu screen, even the slightest change makes a big difference. Unlike the managerial-style addition, this change is mostly for the better. I did find that the way the new UI is organised makes reaching all the different tabs and areas a little bit easier, and it didn’t take me long to get used to the new interface as it felt very natural and intuitive. My one issue with it is that the tactics screen is very different from the previous games and is designed in such a way that your players’ roles and instructions aren’t very visible.
This gets very annoying when you are used to giving a quick glance at your tactics and being able to get all your information at once, compared to now where you have to look around in order to find what should be a simple indicator.
Even non-FM veterans can tell that these changes are very minor and, unless you are a die-hard fan, don’t justify a full-priced upgrade to FM 2015. One feature which keeps getting updated every year in order to become more realistic and more engaging to watch is the 3D match engine. Every year, more realistic animations, more diverse models and new effects are added in order to make the match engine reflect the realism the series tries to achieve. It’s somewhat of a tradition that the match engine is a bit buggy at launch, but FM 2015’s match engine is so buggy and infuriating that it singlehandedly justifies NOT upgrading to this year’s iteration at the moment. If you check out the current user reviews on Steam, metacritic or even FM forums, you will see the same thing: the match engine is broken. There seem to be issues with match fitness, injuries, crossing and corners being “overpowered”, morale dropping way too quickly and the AI scoring too many “fluke” goals and last minute goals. The list goes on, but these are some of the most common complaints - and also some of the most common issues I ran into.
In my first couple of matches with Juventus, I got two humiliating defeats against teams that my reserves should have crushed. Sure, it takes time for teams to get used to a new manager and new tactics, but in previous games I never struggled so much to not lose 5-0 against teams I barely even heard of. I did notice, however, that all the goals I conceded in the first two games had something in common: they came from a cross or a corner kick. I tried many things; I changed my tactics and formations to defend myself from opponents crossing the ball. I changed my instructions to tell my players to keep possession, close down opponents and mark them tightly. I even looked up strategies and tips from other people online and I could not seem to get my team to win a match in pre-season. I got so desperate that I would reload my save game and try the same match again with new tactics just to see if something changed. Nothing seemed to work. It didn’t seem to matter what instructions I gave my players, what formation or tactics I used, every match played out the same way. I would tell my team to stick to short, direct passes and then I would see my defenders kicking long balls to the attackers for no reason. I was truly stumped.
What did end up working for me in the end was to just not use the match engine. I would analyse my opponent’s line up, come up with the formation and just press the instant result button. Surprisingly, this made the results much more in-line with what was to be expected. I would win against teams that should be beaten with closed eyes, I drew against tougher teams and I even lost in a couple of upsets against some small teams. My issues with the game, however, don’t end here. As I stated to play more and get deeper into my season, I realised my players were always tired, constantly getting injured and always had morale issues. I did run into these issues in previous games, but never so quickly and never to such an extent. I thought that maybe I lost my touch with the series or I’ve been missing some key aspects of the game but the FM player base seems to agree with me: Football Manager 2015 is broken, almost unplayable for some.
This isn’t news for the Football Manager series. It always takes a few months of patching to get everything working as intended but, even considering that, Football Manager 2015 is currently somewhat of a mess. The worst part about this is that I like many of the changes; the match engine looks great; players have realistic animations and the stadiums and crowds feel big. The new scouting changes make the whole experience much more engaging and the game in general feels more realistic.
Unfortunately, it’s been years that the match engine has been very buggy at launch and, somehow, this year it’s even worse.
There is a lot to like here and, with some patches and hotfixes, FM 2015 still has the potential to be the best Football Manager yet. At this moment in time, however, you are better off buying an older title and downloading a roster update.