Football Manager 2010 [App Store]

Having played all Sports Interactive games since I was 10 years old back in the 99/00 season, I felt vivdly excited when seeing the release on the App Store. My girlfriend quotes ‘IT’s JUST A GAME’ to me several time a day when losing a match, but for any fan of the series will know its much more, it may even be possible to put SI down as your religion on the Census.

So how can a PC game that takes up alomost 2gb worth of space to play along with pretty huge save files port over to the iPhone succesfully? When first playing the game I was a little dissapointed as it looked a little retro, just like those first CM games I played, with much of the PC features stripped away, the memory sucking 3D engine, the touchline instructions and press conferences (thank god for that one). The stripped down game however takes nothing away from the enoyability of the game, in fact for the less hardcore FM fans this may well be a releif. There are a few dissapointments in the gameplay, such as the lack of ability to tweak tacitical formations and movements, and hopefully these can be sorted in the near future, otherwise at 2-0 down, theres not a lot you can do apart from stick 3 forwards on.

Obviously to create a game on the iPhone, it is only possible to select one playable lague, with a slimmed down database containing the main 20ish players from each team, which sounds like a bad move. It isn’t, instead, it makes you work like a Peter Taylor of the world, trawling through the lower leagues for players who have some potential to improve, or looking whos avaliable on the free. Having signed for my Leicester team players from Leyton Orient and Huddersfield rather than a cheap foreinger from a country I found in the Fifa World Rankings only, I felt a sense of bringing back the O’Neil days to my club.

The key aspects of the game are still intact, with the need to man manage your squad, keeping your players happy or if there not playing letting them move on somewhere else. Maintaining fitness of the older players in the squad is one of the hardest tasks to do and requires shrewd subs, good training schedules for them and promoting through young players to replace them with. Part of squad maintainence in the lower leagues is being able to loan players throughout the year, and the transfer system can be accessed in many ways. Each club as two scouts who can look for players who may be willing to join, whilst the huge search feature is still here. The most important feature of Football Manager for of us geeks out there is the in game stats of our players, being able to scrutinise how our team is doing, how many passes are going astray and figuring out why the opposing left back is racing up the pitch every two minutes, all these stats are still avaliable in game through a menu found in the bottom right corner and can be swiped through to access the different pages.

Wether you play as a Premiership giant, a financial stricken club with no money or a Aussie A-League team you will love Football Manager Handheld as if it was the offspring of the desktop version. Don’t be put off by the lack of some of the desktops features 3 hours in you won’t even notice.

Note to SI: Add a Social Network with Achievements just like Stream on the desktop version, would make this game pretty much complete

Overall

Yes, it costs £6.99, but that is a shrewd investment, you like all others who play FM will lose hours upon days of you life!

Warning: Do not play on this bus, you will miss your stop and whats more you’ll be too busy to care!