Football Management games have bee around for a long time, and every new batch of games seems to bring an increased level of depth and complexity. This isn't always a particularly good thing in my opinion - when a game becomes so involved that it feels like a job rather than a game, it stops being fun and I stop playing it. Therefore the main challenge for any such game has to be including enough depth to please the purists while at the same time retaining the basic accessibility that will keep casual gamers and people like me happy. In this respect Four Four Two: Touchline Passion does a very good job.
The initial game options let you choose between free play, career mode (which is where I'd expect most people to go first), and am option to take control of one of the 20 great European teams (as chosen by Terry Venables). One to four players can compete in the game on the same PC. When you first start with a new club (you can pick any club from several countries, but in my opinion it's more interesting to take a lowly Conference side and try to work your way up) you are interviewed, and your answers will affect your relationship with the fans / board of directors / team etc. Occasionally throughout the game you will be interviewed again (by sports presenter Gabby Logan, vaguely scary in her shiny 2D persona in this game!). When you choose your team you can see how highly they're rated and also what the club's expectations are, so there's a good balance between your performance and how good the team you inherited was.
There are many things you can do in the game, including running the business side of things if you want, but you can choose to do them or leave them to others. Even in terms of picking the team and tactics, it's really set up nicely so that you can be as involved as you want to be, but you don't need to spend hours poring over player stats in meticulous detail before every match. It's not impossible to quickly pick the team, make a few changes, and get some good results. The interface is generally easy to use and getting between different menu screens is usually quick, though a few odd design choices make certain actions a bit long-winded.
Before matches you enter the changing room to give your team last-minute instructions, and you do this again at half-time. The team's urgency, aggression, passing length, shooting style and man-marking system can be tweaked. Not only this but the same attributes can be fine-tuned for each individual player in the squad if you want - I stopped doing this after three or four games though. You can change tactics at any time during the match, as well as make substitutions, analyse match data and so on.
The matches themselves can be portrayed either as a full game (very old-fashioned graphics but the game engine is reasonable) or as a higher-speed version with the player portrayed by small tokens (but you can still see their movement on and off the ball), with it zooming into a full-detail replay when a goal is scored.
The graphics and sound are pretty basic by today's standards, but they do the job. It becomes quite an involving game and some of the more involved elements will draw you in at times even if, like me, you don't want to spend a huge amount of time between games. It's nicely designed so that the extra features are there if you want them, but not obtrusive. Things like training routines and youth team development can basically be left to themselves, but if you want to stamp your own authority on things, it's easy enough to do.
Having the multiplayer function is a nice option (albeit this may be seldom used) and the free play game style, which has less restrictions and perhaps realism than the career mode, is fun. The option of controlling one of the all-time great European teams and the ability to relive the 1981-82 season are the icing on the cake.
Four Four Two: Touchline Passion does have a few little niggles and glitches (the screen sometimes goes a bit wonky during a match, for instance) and the graphics do look very old, but it's a well-constructed and very enjoyable football management game and I recommend it to all fans to whom always having the latest versions with up-to-date squad information isn't too important.
This game works fine on Vista (providing you don't run it in any compatibility mode, oddly enough!). The specs are very low for a modern PC and unless your machine was used for animal inventory in Noah's Ark, you shouldn't have any problems. There might be a bit of slow-down when initially starting the game and straight after matches since there's a lot of data to be processed to get all the other match results, but that's about it.
Official minimum specs are:
Windows 98, 2000, Me, XP (unofficially Vista)
CPU: 450MHz
RAM: 64Mb (128Mb for Windows 2000 & XP)
DirectX 8.1
GPU: 16Mb
HDD Space: 700Mb
The only other football (you overseas know I'm talking about soccer, right?) management game I've reviewed so far is Premier Manager 2003-2004 Season. Very cheap, but very awful.
CaptainD - PC Gaming Blog
The initial game options let you choose between free play, career mode (which is where I'd expect most people to go first), and am option to take control of one of the 20 great European teams (as chosen by Terry Venables). One to four players can compete in the game on the same PC. When you first start with a new club (you can pick any club from several countries, but in my opinion it's more interesting to take a lowly Conference side and try to work your way up) you are interviewed, and your answers will affect your relationship with the fans / board of directors / team etc. Occasionally throughout the game you will be interviewed again (by sports presenter Gabby Logan, vaguely scary in her shiny 2D persona in this game!). When you choose your team you can see how highly they're rated and also what the club's expectations are, so there's a good balance between your performance and how good the team you inherited was.
There are many things you can do in the game, including running the business side of things if you want, but you can choose to do them or leave them to others. Even in terms of picking the team and tactics, it's really set up nicely so that you can be as involved as you want to be, but you don't need to spend hours poring over player stats in meticulous detail before every match. It's not impossible to quickly pick the team, make a few changes, and get some good results. The interface is generally easy to use and getting between different menu screens is usually quick, though a few odd design choices make certain actions a bit long-winded.
Before matches you enter the changing room to give your team last-minute instructions, and you do this again at half-time. The team's urgency, aggression, passing length, shooting style and man-marking system can be tweaked. Not only this but the same attributes can be fine-tuned for each individual player in the squad if you want - I stopped doing this after three or four games though. You can change tactics at any time during the match, as well as make substitutions, analyse match data and so on.
The matches themselves can be portrayed either as a full game (very old-fashioned graphics but the game engine is reasonable) or as a higher-speed version with the player portrayed by small tokens (but you can still see their movement on and off the ball), with it zooming into a full-detail replay when a goal is scored.
The graphics and sound are pretty basic by today's standards, but they do the job. It becomes quite an involving game and some of the more involved elements will draw you in at times even if, like me, you don't want to spend a huge amount of time between games. It's nicely designed so that the extra features are there if you want them, but not obtrusive. Things like training routines and youth team development can basically be left to themselves, but if you want to stamp your own authority on things, it's easy enough to do.
Having the multiplayer function is a nice option (albeit this may be seldom used) and the free play game style, which has less restrictions and perhaps realism than the career mode, is fun. The option of controlling one of the all-time great European teams and the ability to relive the 1981-82 season are the icing on the cake.
Four Four Two: Touchline Passion does have a few little niggles and glitches (the screen sometimes goes a bit wonky during a match, for instance) and the graphics do look very old, but it's a well-constructed and very enjoyable football management game and I recommend it to all fans to whom always having the latest versions with up-to-date squad information isn't too important.
This game works fine on Vista (providing you don't run it in any compatibility mode, oddly enough!). The specs are very low for a modern PC and unless your machine was used for animal inventory in Noah's Ark, you shouldn't have any problems. There might be a bit of slow-down when initially starting the game and straight after matches since there's a lot of data to be processed to get all the other match results, but that's about it.
Official minimum specs are:
Windows 98, 2000, Me, XP (unofficially Vista)
CPU: 450MHz
RAM: 64Mb (128Mb for Windows 2000 & XP)
DirectX 8.1
GPU: 16Mb
HDD Space: 700Mb
The only other football (you overseas know I'm talking about soccer, right?) management game I've reviewed so far is Premier Manager 2003-2004 Season. Very cheap, but very awful.
CaptainD - PC Gaming Blog
Stumble or DIGG this blog:
0 comments:
Post a Comment