Less than a week to go for the most anticipated game of the year: Football Manager 2012 will be released next Friday 21st October. Shops will open at midnight to allow the fans to flock in and Steam will be inundated with potentially hundreds of thousands of downloads.
But will it be worth it? What really is different in this version of the BAFTA winning series compared to FM11? Will it just be an expensive transfers update?
Well, the demo was released over a week ago and tens thousands have downloaded it, myself included, to see exactly what the new game’s all about.
Miles Jacobson and Sports Interactive are boasting over 800 new features as well as it being up-to-date with the 50+ countries and their respective leagues, international competitions and player movements across the globe.
Some of the most exciting features however are to do with making the game’s interface more user friendly, more control in and over more interesting press conferences to name but a few.
Interface
It was a nightmare for those of us less technical to design skins and colour schemes to make our gaming experience perfect. Thankfully, under the preferences section you can still keep your skin, but change the player attribute and preferred position colours to which ever you want.
Navigation
Navigation has also been improved with easier squad menus and also, by holding down the back or forward buttons on the top left, you can see a history of your recent pages (rather like that on internet engine Firefox). From there you can choose which screen to jump to, rather than having to scroll back and forth.
Squads
Not my favourite feature because I think it's a bit of an eye-sore, but it will definitely help those new to the game switch between squads. The squad menu has been added above the regular menu bar in bright colours to help you navigate between squads.
Player Search
The player search has been improved, removing the separate clunky filter menu and placing it on top of the search results making it much easier to look for and filter potential players. Another feature, although this works on all screens is Multiple Select. A tick to the left of each player allows them to join a list where you can carry out multiple actions which include scouting, adding to shortlist and moving between squads.
Tone
There are more options to the previously boring press conferences, match instructions and player/staff conversations. You now influence the tone of any conversation or team talks. Anything from calm to passionate and aggressive. This will hopefully lead more people t becoming more interactive with their teams and not just leaving team talks and press conferences to the assistant.
Add/remove leagues
Easily the best new feature, although I am yet to try it as it's unavailable for the demo. If you fancy, halfway through your game, to manage in another country you can simply add the relavent league. Not only will this option allow you to expand your game, it will allow you to drop leagues that you don't need any more (for instance lower leagues that you've already passed through) to allow faster game speed. And, most importantly (for me), if you're in February next year you it will allow you to add a league at of the start of the game where the league begins in January (USA, Ireland) then remove it, thus keeping your game contemporaneous and ensuring you don't have to have a dudd league or be on holiday from the start of the game.
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