As far as soccer management games go, Football Manager 2 held the top spot for a ridiculously long time.
The first version of this game, Football Manager, led the way into the realm of managing your own soccer team. However, shortly after Football Manager garnered such great support, two competitors showed up, each with a different approach. Football Director nearly eliminated graphics completely, instead giving players a deluge of information to number-crunch and strategize, while Doubles forced players to use actual observation and trial-and-error rather than simply looking at data sheets.
As far as soccer management games go, Football Manager 2 held the top spot for a ridiculously long time.
The first version of this game, Football Manager, led the way into the realm of managing your own soccer team. However, shortly after Football Manager garnered such great support, two competitors showed up, each with a different approach. Football Director nearly eliminated graphics completely, instead giving players a deluge of information to number-crunch and strategize, while Doubles forced players to use actual observation and trial-and-error rather than simply looking at data sheets. Football Manager 2 attempts to glean the positive aspects of both approaches, while still trying to keep to the original, beloved structure of Football Manager itself. And it does a fantastic job!
The graphics, of course, are
much improved from the original. The screen is split into three--attack, midfield and defense. You still follow in the format of the original and choose the positions for each of the player, which is where he will try to "dominate". The higher-rated player in the face-off usually is the one who will win the balls.
At the start, you can choose a difficulty from one (yawn easy) to 9 (ball-breakingly hard). There is no system for automatically raising the difficulty for you, so you have to suck it up and give up the nice feeling of stomping your opponents every game 5-0 if you want it to be competitive.
A lot of sweet features have been added to halftime as opposed to the original. You can swap players around, bring in a substitute, and easily mend many mistakes that you may have made in the first half. These features make you much more of a PARTICIPANT in the game, and do well to ease the feeling of being a helpless bystander which was sometimes prominent in the first version of this glorious game.
There are many other new features, but they're hard to fully describe here and worth checking out: a complete transfer market, "success points," the ability to get a sponsorship, and the addition of the League Cup, for example. However, the glory of Football Manager 2 really comes not in its addition of new features but in its sticking to a structure that works: Make logical, informed decisions and you will be a success at this game.
Download it now!!! :-)
