Football Manager 2012 Review

The latest game in the FM series, Football Manager 2012, has just been launched this Friday and, as you can imagine, I have been playing the game non stop since then. I guess that says from the start just about how good this game actually is – and if you’re not convinced already, read on this Football Manager 2012 review to find out.

One might find it extremely strange for a game that gets a new version every year to be actually worth the money spent on it: just how many improvements could they bring each year? Well, this year there were 800 of them so I guess that is enough to consider Football Manager 2012 a “new” game.

However, the core of the game can’t and won’t be changed: you can still become the manager of almost any team in the world, from Viitorul Constanta in the second division in Romania to top teams like Barcelona or Manchester United. You become the head coach and take the team you have chosen to greater glory or completely ruin their reputation… it’s all up for you to do and you shouldn’t expect an easy challenge!

The match engine has suffered a lot of improvements in Football Manager 2012 and you will finally get a much better looking game that seems to be more realistic than ever. Unfortunately, there are still bugs to be fixed here and the most annoying one, at least for me, is that bug (because I don’t know how else to call it) when the ball simply hits players on its trajectory: the game probably judges the intention of the player to send the ball to a specific place and if it happens for a player to be in the way… bad luck! That takes much of the realism, but fortunately it doesn’t happen that often. And we’ll also get the patches pretty soon and hopefully they’ll fix that!

The way you interact with your players has also changed a lot, making things a bit more complex, meaning that you can now set different tones when talking to players (be calm, reluctant or aggressive for a few examples) while team meetings can now be held to praise the lads or criticize their performances. And these talks could be exactly what your team wins to keep winning, turn a result or get out of the recent losing spree!

And there are tons of other changes brought to the game to make Football Manager 2012 the best in the series to day: the interface itself is better, the team reports have now changed and offer valuable information, scouting players finally tells you exactly what you want to know about the scouted player, you can no longer create exotic friendlies with teams on other continents to get buckets of money for the team and everything seems to be more real than ever.

So if you are a fan of the Football Manager series already, you should definitely buy FM 2012 because the game (still) manages to offer a unique experience and feel like a completely new game that will most likely get you hooked for one year starting now. And even if you have never played this game before, but you’d like to turn Macclesfield into the next Manchester United and become the greatest manager of all times, Football Manager 2012 is the game you should get!